Summary Of The Issues In Hockey V. V Fairfax

The way that a defendant has acted in defamation, brings up the question of how reasonable the defendant was when breaching the Defamation Act. The Issues in Hockey v Fairfax, in terms of reasonableness, stemmed from the way that Fairfax acted in the creation of the newspaper article titled “Treasurer for Sale” and the decision of the chosen title as well as the poster and three tweets, posted about the newspaper article. Reasonableness in the way that Fairfax acted is a necessary consideration in the tort of defamation, as such, White J was required to consider the actions that Fairfax went through in order to determine the seriousness of the accusation by Hockey. I will argue that White J’s assessment of the situation and the reasonableness
Fairfax media published the newspaper articles outlining how Hockey had granted private access to select members of the community, in exchange for donations to his political campaign. White J found, with respect to the published articles, that, under Section 30(3)(i) , there was no consideration of “alternative meanings…for the choice of words…in the headline” , also finding that “there were inadequacies… to obtain a response by Hockey” , under Section 30(3)(h) . In terms of the poster, White J found that “there were readily available alternative formats of the poster” that were not explored by Fairfax, rather, there was no effort to find any defamatory meaning that could have been associated with the poster. The publication of the tweets by Fairfax was also found to not be reasonable. Similar to the poster, the tweets could have been reworded in a non-defamatory way, however, this was not cross checked with anyone at Fairfax, thus leading White J to believe that the conduct, in relation to the tweets was not reasonable. Overall, White J, decided that the newspaper articles, the poster and the tweets were not published with reasonable