Adjudication No. 735 (July 1994) [1994] APC 44

ADJUDICATION No. 735 (July 1994)

A complaint by the chairman of the British Heritage Group about comments by columnist Phillip Adams in The Weekend Australian has been dismissed by the Australian Press Council.

The group's chairman, Mr B G Hunt, of Victoria, had demanded, in a letter to the editor, that Mr Adams publish an apology for remarks that were said to be insulting to "the British community in Australia".

In a column piece in The Weekend Australian of 9-10 April, Mr Adams was commenting on a recently published book about some of history's famous feuds and hatreds and lamenting that none of Australia's notable feuds and hatreds - and he cited some of them - had got a mention. He wrote, in part:

"He gives us Caesar versus Plutarch, Huxley versus the parsons, Whistler versus Ruskin, Whistler versus Wilde, Lord Alfred Douglas versus the Marquess of Queensberry, Lord Reith versus Churchill, Kitty Kelley versus Sinatra, Jimmy Hoffa versus Bobby Kennedy, J. Edgar Hoover versus Martin Luther King, and others too numerous to mention ...

"We see feuds between individuals, between individuals and institutions, feuds between previously happy collaborators or lovers or friends, but none of them are Australian.

"Yet Australia can field more full-bottle, prime-time haters than all those pommy poofters put together ..."

The editor wrote to Mr Hunt saying "We are sorry these comments offended you", but indicating the freedom given by the paper to Mr Adams' "colourful style".

Mr Hunt complained to the Press Council that the reference to "pommy poofters" was insulting and "completely unacceptable to the British community".

The Press Council has no difficulty in accepting that the phrase would be offensive to some people but is unable to find that the fact that an obviously irreverent column is offensive to some is in itself a breach of the Council's principles governing honest, fair and decent press behaviour and publication.