By MARK PEARSON Follow @Journlaw
A tort of privacy is on the agenda again, with the Gillard Government purportedly considering enacting such a right.
West Australian lawyer Ainslie Van Onselen has outlined many reasons why such a privacy tort could be dangerous to free expression in a democracy like Australia’s, but unfortunately her article is behind The Australian’s paywall, so I republish my earlier article and blog here for the benefit of students and researchers interested in that debate.
The right to privacy is a relatively modern international legal concept. Until the late 19th century gentlemen used the strictly codified practice of the duel to settle their disputes over embarrassing exposés of their private lives.
The first celebrity to convert his personal affront into a legal suit was the author of The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas père, who in 1867 sued a photographer who had attempted to register copyright in some steamy images of Dumas with the ‘Paris Hilton’ of the day – 32-year-old actress Adah Isaacs Menken.
The court held his property rights had not been infringed but that he did have a right to privacy and that the photographer had infringed it.
Across the Atlantic in 1890 the top US jurist Samuel D. Warren teamed with future Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis to write the seminal Harvard Law Review article ‘The Right to Privacy’ after a newspaper printed the guest list of a party held at the Warren family mansion in Boston.
Warren and Brandeis wrote: “The press is overstepping in every direction the obvious bounds of propriety and of decency. Gossip is no longer the resource of the idle and of the vicious, but has become a trade, which is pursued with industry as well as effrontery.”
Thus celebrities, lawyers, paparazzi and the gossip media were there at the birth of the right to privacy – and the same players occupy that terrain today.
While both privacy and free expression are recognised in many national constitutions and in international human rights treaties, Australia is rare among Western democracies in that it has no constitutional or Bill of Rights protection for either.
That distinguishes us from the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand which all have constitutional or rights charter requirements that proposed laws must be considered for their potential impact on free expression.
It is one of the main reasons for the complex array of legislation, court decisions and industry codes of practice limiting Australian journalists’ intrusion into the affairs of their fellow citizens.
The myriad of laws of defamation, trespass, data protection, surveillance, confidentiality, discrimination, consumer law, stalking, court publishing restrictions, suppression orders and copyright all have a privacy dimension. The Privacy Act controls the collection and storage of private information by corporations and government.
There are very few situations of media intrusion into privacy not covered by one of these laws or by the framework of codes of ethics and practice controlling journalists’ professional activities.
Proposals to replace the self-regulatory and co-regulatory ethics systems with a statutory news media regulator would add yet another layer to the regulation of privacy intrusions.
The crux of the proposed ‘statutory cause of action for a serious invasion of privacy’ is whether a citizen should have the right to sue over a privacy breach and receive either an award of damages or an injunction to stop publication.
Over the ditch, Kiwi journalists now have to navigate a judge-made right to privacy, developed interestingly from a celebrity suit in which the plaintiffs lost the case.
Mike and Marie Hosking were New Zealand media personalities who had adopted twins and later separated. They asked for their privacy, but a magazine photographer snapped the mother walking the twins in their stroller in a public place. They sued, claiming breach of privacy. The NZ Court of Appeal invented a new action for breach of privacy, but held it did not apply in that particular case. The Kiwi privacy invasion test requires “the existence of facts in respect of which there is a reasonable expectation of privacy” and that “publicity given to those private facts that would be considered highly offensive to an objective reasonable person”.
But this is set against the backdrop of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act which protects free expression.
Australia’s High Court famously left the door open for a possible privacy tort in the ABC v. Lenah Game Meats case in 2001, when animal liberationists had secretly filmed the slaughter of possums in an abattoir in Tasmania and the ABC wanted to broadcast the footage – the fruits of the trespass.
It is hard to quarantine this latest push by the Federal Government from the News of the World scandal in the UK and the Greens-championed Finkelstein inquiry into media regulation.
The government had effectively sat upon the Australian Law Reform Commission’s proposal for the statutory cause of action for three years before progressing the matter with its Issues Paper last September in the wake of the phone hacking revelations from London. Now it has revisited it as part of its media regulation review which included both the Finkelstein report and the Convergence Review recommendations.
Few journalists or their media organisations object to the notion of their fellow citizens’ embarrassing private information being kept secret.
However, it is in the midst of a breaking story like that involving collar bomb extortion victim Madeleine Pulver, a celebrity scoop like the Sonny Bill Williams toilet tryst images or the case of the fake Pauline Hanson photos that genuine ‘public interest’ gives way to audience gratification and the resulting boost to circulation, ratings or page views.
Free expression is already greatly diminished by this mire of privacy-related laws and regulations without adding a new statutory cause of action for privacy.
But if this latest proposal is advanced further, journalists should insist upon:
– a free expression and public interest defence reinforced in the strongest possible terms;
– removal of the existing laws it would duplicate; and
– strong ‘offer of amends’ defence like that now operating in defamation law and alternative dispute resolution provisions to deter celebrity gold diggers.
Short of a bill of rights enshrining freedom of the press and free expression, these demands amount to the minimum the news media deserve in a Western democracy.
* An earlier version of this article was published in May 2012 in the annual press freedom report by the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance – Kicking at the Cornerstone of Democracy.
© Mark Pearson 2012
Disclaimer: While I write about media law and ethics, nothing here should be construed as legal advice. I am an academic, not a lawyer. My only advice is that you consult a lawyer before taking any legal risks.
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