Proposed changes will also ‘put downward pressure on damages for hurt feelings’

This article is more than 9 months old

This article is more than 9 months old

The Australian council of attorneys general have agreed to a radical overhaul of Australia’s defamation laws to “put downward pressure on damages for hurt feelings”, with proposed changes likely to be brought in by June.

The New South Wales attorney general, Mark Speakman, who steered the review of defamation reform, released a set of draft proposed amendments to defamation law that will be introduced into all parliaments after a short round of public consultation over the next two months.

The amendments include:

Requiring a plaintiff to show serious harm to warrant defamation action

Require concerns notice to be given to a publisher before defamation proceedings may be commenced

A new defence for peer-reviewed material in academic or scientific journals

A new defence for responsible communications for matters in the public interest

A change so that maximum damages for non-economic losses are awarded only in the most serious cases

Single publication rule, so that online publishers can be sued only in the defined period after the alleged defamatory content was first published, not each time the page is clicked on.

The changes are in line with what Speakman outlined last week ahead of the meeting in Adelaide on Friday morning.

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Speakman said the changes would bring Australia’s defamation laws into the digital age.

“These reforms will unclog our courts of neighbourhood tiffs, they will put downward pressure on damages for hurt feelings, and they will protect responsible public interest journalism,” he said.

“It’s perhaps miraculous that all states and territories and the commonwealth can agree on these reforms, a very tight and ambitious timetable, with a view to having these laws in place by June 2020.”

The federal attorney general, Christian Porter, agreed.

“That is a very, very rare thing, and I hope that that will be recognised in the consultation process, that these very significant reforms to the way in which defamation law should work in Australia have the agreement from both sides of politics, from the commonwealth and every single state and territory, as the logical starting point,” he said.

The draft amendments outline that the changes would apply only to alleged defamatory material published after the legislation passes.

Other agreements forged at Friday’s meeting included more work on implementing the recommendations of the child sexual abuse royal commission, and an agreement that a working group on the age of criminal responsibility should have a public consultation and report back in 2020.

Porter, a former prosecutor, told 5AA radio he was “not an enthusiast” for raising the age of criminal responsibility from 10 to 14, given doli incapax requires proving that someone between 10 and 14 knows what they were doing was morally wrong and criminal.

“If you raise the age of criminal responsibility to a hard floor of 14 there is never any ability to make that case and argument against a 13-and-a-half-year-old, and I just think that history has shown that there are some rare instances where the flexibility is required to be able to make that case, and I think that’s in line with community expectations,” he said.