There is a real danger that newsrooms suffering financial pressures could steer away from important China-related stories out of fear of defamation suits. For freelancers without the backing of a major media outlet, reporting such stories is almost impossible. In 2017 the possibility of legal action was cited as one reason the publisher Allen & Unwin dumped Clive Hamilton’s “Silent Invasion,” a book about China’s role in Australia.

The terms of Australia’s engagement with China are of vital importance, since Australia — which ships a third of its exports to China — is the most China-dependent economy in the developed world. It has just introduced new foreign influence transparency laws in the wake of a political donations scandal and a testy debate about the extent of Chinese influence inside Australian institutions. But the defamation regime means the parameters of the public debate are defined not by necessity but by lawyers.

The current system is unworkable. Australia’s unique legal situation arises out of its lack of a Bill of Rights or any explicit constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech. Against this backdrop, Australia’s defamation law tends to privilege the right to reputation over freedom of expression. Defending an action is often far costlier than settling, making the law especially punitive for media companies. According to Richard Coleman, a lawyer for the Fairfax Media group, only 10 percent to 15 percent of defamation claims against it ever make it to court. But all cases, even vexatious ones, tie up resources at media outlets already struggling with collapsing circulation, disappearing advertising and costly buyouts.

A handful of high-profile defamation cases can effectively serve as a brake on free speech. I experienced a very small taste of the law’s muzzling impact firsthand late in 2017, when I co-authored a story about the existence of a Confucius Institute within the New South Wales Department of Education, an unprecedented arrangement placing employees paid by a Chinese entity inside an Australian state government department. Our story led to a government review, which is ongoing.

Even for a China veteran, I was taken aback by the heavy lawyering for this article. The story was carefully vetted by two lawyers, who excised direct quotes, deleted people’s names and removed statistics and quotes that were already in the public domain, in Australia’s Chinese-language newspapers. They made these redactions even though no one was certain whether the Confucius Institute has standing to sue in Australian courts. The lawyers were simply doing their job, but the effect is nothing less than self-censorship.

As a result, the Australian public is less informed and less able to monitor its own institutions. National security is also at risk, especially since these defamation laws could be weaponized by authoritarian states, wielding the heightened threat of lawsuits as a cudgel to silence reporting about their activities.

A long-running review of the defamation laws, led by New South Wales, is slowly grinding onward, but an upgrade is desperately needed. The current defamation law was introduced in 2006, predating the social media era. To protect journalism, Australian lawmakers should strengthen the public-interest defense, putting in place protections for confidential sources and a single-publication rule, to stop multiple actions over the same article.

Justice is supposed to be blind, but this legal battlefield favors those with financial means, impoverishing principles like freedom of the press. The ultimate damage will be to Australia’s democracy.

Louisa Lim is a senior lecturer at the Centre for Advancing Journalism at the University of Melbourne, and a former NPR and BBC correspondent based in Beijing. She is the author of “The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited” and a co-host of “The Little Red Podcast.”

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