Defamation laws too restrictive?

Press, 1 December 1988, Page 14

Defamation laws too restrictive?

PA Wellington Restrictive defamation laws prevented a newspaper publishing information which might have helped save the public from risky investments, a Parliamentary select committee was told yesterday.

Examples of the conflict between “the public’s right to know’’ and the risk of defamation action were presented to the Justice and Law Reform Select Committee yesterday in a joint media presentation of a submission on the Defamation Bill. But the committee itself became temporarily hamstrung over the same issue. The editors’ committee chairman, Mr Rick Swinard, said he wanted to present four examples of how the defamation law had strangled the recent publication of stories which newspapers believed the public should know about. But he did not want to risk further legal action by presenting the information to the committee. For a while it seemed reporters might be excluded from covering some parts of the committee but the chairman, Mr Bill Dillon, said it seemed inappropriate that parts of a submission on defamation should be held in secret.

Eventually the editors decided to exclude one of their examples, apparently relating to East Coast arson inquiries. One of the examples given came from the "Dominion” newspaper, in Wellington, which said it had been investigating “what it considered to be questionable acitivities by a group or groups of people acquiring money from the investing public.” The paper made substantial research and commitment to its inquiries. But although it amassed considerable knowledge, it was restricted to initially publishing specific examples of abnormal property dealings. Later the paper published specific articles on Registered Securities, Ltd, although the paper was sure R.S.L. had incurred vast losses, because of defamation considerations it was only able to publish a “flat” article comparing R.S.L.’s published lending criteria with its known lending performance. R.S.L. sought an injunc-

tion to restrain publication of some articles but Mr Swinard said R.S.L. never took legal steps to enforce its claims. “The real losers were members of the public who invested when there was information relating to irregularities but which could not be published for fear of defamation.” John Stevenson, a lawyer, told the committee the Defamation Bill did not go far enough in allowing the media to publish where publication was in the public interest. The examples given -to the committee would not still be able to be published under the proposed law, he said. Mr Swinard said there was no suggestion there should be any reduction in the media’s responsibility to report fairly and accurately. Radio New Zealand’s general manager of news and information, Mr Chris Turver, said the joint submission’s main thrust was that the public interest had not been well served by the defamation laws