{"id":660038,"date":"2022-05-18T12:06:07","date_gmt":"2022-05-18T12:06:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dissidentvoice.org\/?p=129725"},"modified":"2022-05-18T12:06:07","modified_gmt":"2022-05-18T12:06:07","slug":"peter-duttons-defamation-defeat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2022\/05\/18\/peter-duttons-defamation-defeat\/","title":{"rendered":"Peter Dutton\u2019s Defamation Defeat"},"content":{"rendered":"

The occasions when an activist, writer or commentator triumph over defamation lawsuits launched by a thin-skinned politician are rare in Australia.\u00a0 When it comes to matters regarding the law of reputation, Australia remains a place<\/a> where parliamentarians, as a species, thrive in the knowledge they can use favourable provisions to protect their hurt feelings and soiled reputations.<\/p>\n

The country, in also lacking a bill of rights protecting free speech and the press, has further emboldened politicians.\u00a0 At best, the Australian High Court has only left an anaemic implied right<\/a> \u201cto protect freedom of communication on political subjects\u201d, which should really be read as a restraint on executive and legislative power, never to be personally exercised.<\/p>\n

Defence Minister Peter Dutton, ever the nasty enforcer of the Morrison government, was one who had every reason to feel confident when he took refugee activist Shane Bazzi to court in April last year.\u00a0 In February 2021, Bazzi published a six-word tweet: \u201cPeter Dutton is a rape apologist.\u201d<\/p>\n

The tweet was made some hours after Dutton had told a press conference<\/a> that he had not been furnished with the finer details of a rape allegation made by former Coalition staffer Britney Higgins.\u00a0 The context here was also important.\u00a0 Dutton had, when Home Affairs Minister, characterised refugee women being held on Nauru, one of Australia\u2019s carceral domains, as \u201ctrying it on\u201d to get access to the Australian mainland for medical treatment.<\/p>\n

The following month, this sadist-in-chief promised<\/a> that he would start to \u201cpick out some\u201d individuals who were \u201ctrending on Twitter or have the anonymity of different Twitter accounts\u201d posting \u201call these statements and tweets that are frankly defamatory.\u201d It was an informal declaration of war against critics.<\/p>\n

In instigating proceedings against Bazzi, Dutton claimed in the trial<\/a> that he was \u201cdeeply offended\u201d by the contents of the tweet.\u00a0 He accepted that, \u201cAs a minister for immigration or home affairs \u2026 people make comments that are false or untrue, offensive, profane, but that\u2019s part of the rough and tumble.\u201d\u00a0 But Bazzi had gone one step too far<\/a>.\u00a0 \u00a0\u201cIt was somebody that held himself out as an authority or a journalist.\u201d\u00a0 His remarks \u201cwent beyond\u201d the tolerably bruising nature of politics. \u201cAnd it went against who I am, my beliefs \u2026 I thought it was hurtful.\u201d<\/p>\n

In finding for Dutton in November and awarding $35,000 in damages, Justice Richard White ruled<\/a> that the tweet had been defamatory, and that Bazzi could not resort to the defence of honest opinion.\u00a0 Dutton failed to gain damages in three of the four imputations, while also troubling<\/a> the judge with his hunger in pursuing the defendant for the full legal bill.\u00a0 But in his remarks on Bazzi\u2019s claim of honest opinion, White was dismissive.\u00a0 \u201cBazzi may have used the word \u2018apologist\u2019 without an understanding of the meaning he was, in fact conveying.\u201d\u00a0 If this had been the case, \u201cit would follow that he did not hold the opinion actually conveyed by the words.\u201d<\/p>\n

On May 17, Bazzi found that he had convinced the Full Court of the Federal Court that the reasoning behind the six-word tweet, and the purportedly defamatory imputations it conveyed, was flawed.\u00a0 Justices Steven Rares and Darryl Rangiah, in a joint judgment<\/a>, found that Justice White had erred in not explaining \u201chow the reader would understand the whole (or any part) of the tweet to convey the imputation.\u201d\u00a0 They also noted that Justice White had found the meaning of the word \u201capologist\u201d was not that of an excuser but of a defender.\u00a0 \u201cWhen the material is read with Mr Bazzi\u2019s six words, the reader would conclude that the tweet was suggesting that Mr Dutton was sceptical about claims of rape and in that way was an apologist.\u201d\u00a0 It was \u201cvery different from imputing that he excuses rape itself.\u201d<\/p>\n

The judges put much stock in the context of the tweet, and the need to read it alongside Dutton\u2019s previous remarks on the women held on Nauru as recorded in The Guardian<\/em>.\u00a0 \u201cThe reader would perceive that the message in the tweet consisted of both parts, Mr Bazzi\u2019s six word statement and The Guardian<\/em> material, read together.\u201d\u00a0 When read together, the reader \u201cwould understand that the point that the tweet was conveying was that a \u2018rape apologist\u2019 behaves in the way Mr Dutton had in expressing scepticism about the claims of rape.\u00a0 That is a far cry from conveying the meaning that he excuses rape itself.\u201d<\/p>\n

Justice Michael Wigney also found<\/a> that the primary judge had erred in finding the tweet defamatory and \u201csubstantially agreed\u201d with the two other justices.\u00a0 It was \u201ctolerably clear\u201d that Bazzi\u2019s statement \u201cwas about, or responsive to, the extract from The Guardian<\/em> article.\u201d\u00a0 The primary judge had erred in how the ordinary reasonable Twitter user would have read the tweet, downplaying, for instance, the significance of the link to the article.<\/p>\n

Accordingly, \u201cIt was wrong for the primary judge, in analysing whether Mr Bazzi\u2019s tweet conveyed the alleged imputation, to dissect and segregate the tweet in the way he did.\u201d\u00a0 While the tweet did convey \u201can impression that is derogatory and critical of [Dutton\u2019s] attitude to rape or rape allegations,\u201d it did \u201cnot go so far as to convey the impression that [Dutton] is a person who excuses rape\u201d.<\/p>\n

Dutton\u2019s litigious boldness was much in keeping with the Morrison government\u2019s general hostility to social media outlets and the internet, in general.\u00a0 Prime Minister Scott Morrison has shown a willingness to do battle with social media and making the platforms assume greater responsibility for material hosted on their sites.\u00a0 Taking advantage of the killings in Christchurch in March 2019, he exploited the chance<\/a> to pursue a global agenda of online censorship.\u00a0 \u201cWe urge online platforms to step up the ambition and pace of their efforts to prevent terrorist and VECT (violent extremism conducive to terrorism) content being streamed, uploaded, or re-uploaded.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the latter part of last year, the government announced that it was drafting laws<\/a> that would make social media companies gather user details and permit courts to force the divulging of user identities in defamation proceedings.\u00a0 While a re-elected Morrison government will be a dark day for internet freedoms and expression, Dutton\u2019s defeat is a cause for genuine celebration.\u00a0 It also heralds the need to water down the persistently draconian nature of laws that do all too much in protecting that strange animal known as the offended politician.<\/p>The post Peter Dutton\u2019s Defamation Defeat<\/a> first appeared on Dissident Voice<\/a>.\n

This post was originally published on Dissident Voice<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The occasions when an activist, writer or commentator triumph over defamation lawsuits launched by a thin-skinned politician are rare in Australia.\u00a0 When it comes to matters regarding the law of reputation, Australia remains a place where parliamentarians, as a species, thrive in the knowledge they can use favourable provisions to protect their hurt feelings and [\u2026]<\/p>\n

The post Peter Dutton\u2019s Defamation Defeat<\/a> first appeared on Dissident Voice<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":30,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[175,2828,732,524,238,739],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/660038"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/30"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=660038"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/660038\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":660039,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/660038\/revisions\/660039"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=660038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=660038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=660038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}