Crispin Hull

It is rare for a defendant to win a defamation action. It is even rarer for a media defendant to win one.

Judges are usually quick to find defamatory imputations arising out of a publication; require a huge amount of evidence to find they have been proven true and are reluctant to give any leeway for unproved imputations on the grounds of fair comment, honest belief, reasonableness and so on.

In the 70-year history of the ACT Supreme Court (and lower courts) you can count the media victories in defamation cases on the fingers of one hand.

So it was quite refreshing last week to see a defendant win a defamation case in the ACT. The case was decided by Justice Margaret Stone – one of the many Federal Court judges who also hears the occasional ACT Supreme Court case under arrangements made when the Full Federal Court was the court of appeal for the ACT.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 9 June 2007 defo”

One of the great boring mantras in Canberra in the past two decades has been, “We never wanted self-government. All we need is a town council.”

Well, in a way that is what we have got.

I know that the de rigueur view around town is to display a disdainful non-interest in the affairs of Canberra government, even though it affects most of us more profoundly than the affairs in the Big House of the Hill, and to complain bitterly about taxes, charges and services.

Next week is ACT Budget week. It is to be a mild one, according to Jon Stanhope, who is Chief Minister and Treasurer.

But he is also wears another couple of hats when he brings down the Budget. He is also Mayor, or Shire President and Shire Clerk.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 2 Jun 2007 local government”

History may not repeat itself, but it throws up some uncannily similar events from time to time. The immutability of human nature almost dictates it.

This week it was difficult not to recall events of 13 and a half years ago.

Again it was a Senate Estimates Committee hearing. Again it was about the dining facilities of the Prime Minister. Again it was about the leader of a long-entrenched Government not understanding the difference between the trappings and traps of office.

Remember the $25,000 Thai dining table then Prime Minister Paul Keating installed at the Lodge? Remember how it was uncovered in Senate Estimates? Remember the $50,000 Keating spent on 15 Gould bird prints?
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 26 may 2007 keating”

Usually state and territory Governments are happy to subsidise, bribe, cajole and attract businesses. They cite the mantra of jobs, jobs, jobs.

But other times other mantras are more powerful, for example: water, water, water.

Stage 4 water restrictions are about to be imposed because the Government must be seen to be doing something, and, admittedly, Canberra’s water supply is under some strain.

Nurseries, car wash places and the swimming-pool industry are under threat.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 19 may 2007 water”

Again this Budget, Treasurer Peter Costello has done nothing to cut the taxes for those on average incomes.

Yes, you read right. There are no tax cuts for those on average incomes. But as classic propaganda theory goes, the bigger the lie and the more often it is repeated the more likely it is to be believed.

Tax cuts for everyone, the headlines said. Nonsense.

Let us look at the person on average income from the year the GST came in through to the end of the 2008-2009 tax year. And let us compare that to someone on four times the average income in the same period.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 12 may 2007 tax”

The scent of power is strong for Labor. So from Labor’s perspective why would you want to devalue the prize?

Why would you want to reduce the power of an in-coming Labor Government will a Bill of Rights or a Human Rights Act which could hinder its capacity to enact whatever laws it wanted?

It is not surprising that last weekend’s ALP National Conference voted against the idea.

The union movement and much of the Labor Party has no interest in a Bill of Rights because it might contain a clause enshrining freedom of association.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 5 may 2007 bill of rights”

O NE OF the many infuriating things about a computer crash is the loss of the custom dictionary in the word processor.

Of course, one should always assume the computer will crash with loss of all data any day and be religious about doing back-ups of everything. Alas, I am not especially religious. Nearly everything has been saved, but not that custom dictionary. It means adding to the dictionary hundreds of unusual proper nouns, like Warrnambool with two Rs and Waramanga with one, so they do not appear as mistakes, and when you do make a mistake like Warnambool you know it actually is one and must be corrected. I could decide not to worry about adding such words to the dictionary, but then you have to check every subsequent time you use them, as the ravages of age befuddle the brain. Anyway, the proper nouns are not so bad. Worse, is the fact that many British spellings are thrown up as spelling errors. Again, they have to be added to the dictionary.

Again, so a real mistake is recorded as error such as sucour and does not squeak through uncorrected as just another British spelling being denounced by Microsoft’s spell-checker. It is perhaps fortuitous that the crash came in the same week as I have been marking some student assignments and the same week as the retirement (for the second time this time at age 80 after working nearly 20 years part-time) of a former chief sub-editor of The Canberra Times, Michael Travis. He was a stickler for not only getting spelling right, but in sound English usage in general. He would applaud the use of ”fortuitous” in the previous paragraph because I meant accidental and undesigned, not fortunate.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 28 April 2007 PC war of words”

I T WAS mere coincidence that Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd brought down his new industrial relations policy on the day we were getting news from the US about another horrific campus multiple shooting.

Oddly enough, though, the events stem from a similar thing constitutional failure. Australia is fortunate that perhaps its greatest constitutional flaw industrial relations is much less costly than America’s the ”right” to bear arms. And it seems that Australia is well on the way to overcoming the constitutional flaw, whereas the Americans, tragically, are nowhere near it. The US Constitution says: ”A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” It has resulted in many gun control laws being struck down as unconstitutional. It has led to state and federal legislators refusing to take action under the misguided belief that the Constitution gives an unbridled right to bear arms (carry guns).

So what is the point of trying to legislate. It has given succour to organisations like the National Rifle Association to work against laws that would control gun sales under the guise of constitutional freedom. The constitutional clause is a non sequitur. The language does not tie the second bit (the right to bear arms) with the first bit (a well- regulated militia). But as a matter of law, judges must assume that words are not put into a constitution for the fun of it. The right to bear arms should have been interpreted in a way that had some bearing to ”a well-regulated militia”. Alas, the US Supreme Court has not said that a person’s right to bear arms must be contingent upon them being a member of ”a well-regulated militia” and any militia that is ”well- regulated” would ensure all its arms were under lock and key and that no one person would be able to have a key to both the gun store and the ammunition store.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 21 April 2007 Rudd IR”

I T SEEMS the US executive tried just a bit too hard to please the Australian Government.

The people in administration who oversee the Military Commission which ”tried” David Hicks came up with a deal over the head of the military prosecutors. The deal which slapped a one year gag on Hicks. It is almost self- evidently a deal spawned by the executive because it is contrary to more than 200 years of US jurisprudential tradition of free speech and contrary to Australian constitutional freedom of political communication.

The gag, if enforceable, would last until after the Australian election, so the Americans thought they were helping their ally. They thought wrongly. Obviously the Australian Government would like Hicks to talk to the media. An enforceable gag order would be a poor result. It would mean that anything Hicks said would be filtered through third parties like his legal team or his father.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 7 April 2007 hicks”