Coroner & Legal
NATION: Poor, Poor Joe …
A defamation battle between one of the nation’s most senior political figures and one of its oldest newspaper publishers has exposed one of the central difficulties of defamation law. It protects the interests of the wealthy and powerful.
Make no mistake, Treasurer Joe Hockey will be none too pleased with an order that Fairfax pay just 15 per cent of his legal costs of his defamation case against the publisher.
But a well-resourced politician is in a far better position to shoulder his or her own legal costs, which would substantially exceed the $200,000 damages payout in this case, than many would-be plaintiffs seeking vindication of their reputation.
“One of the long-standing criticisms of defamation law is that costs are prohibitive, which means ordinary people are dissuaded from suing in the first place,” said media law expert David Rolph, an associate professor at the University of Sydney.
The Hockey case highlights that the financial costs of a defamation trial – just one of the tolls of litigation – may swamp any damages payout.
But it was also an unusual case because the result was not clear-cut, allowing both sides to claim to be the victor.
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Kim Peart in Comments: It’s a battle out there, on the field of entitlement, where a cigar generated smoke screen is all the rage. A smouldering cigar also helps to light the fuses of the bombs to be thrown at the press, if they offend entitled sensibilities by telling too much truth. Meanwhile the people turn blue, forced to hold their breath in the face of all that cigar smoke, waiting for the air to clear enough to vote.