Adjudication No. 784 (March 1995) [1995] APC 14

ADJUDICATION No. 784 (March 1995)

The Australian Press Council has upheld a complaint by the coordinator of the Cairns and Far North Environment Centre (CAFNEC) against an editorial in the Cairns Post.

The editorial of December 3, 1994, strongly criticised the Federal Environment Minister, Senator Faulkner, for having stopped work on a major development at Oyster Point, Hinchinbrook, near Cardwell, and said the Federal Government should allow a resumption.

Major claims in the editorial were that the Minister's decision "appears to have been based on little scientific evidence" and that the developer "had received all the necessary approvals" before the Minister blocked work.

The CAFNEC coordinator, Sean Purcell, said both claims were demonstrably wrong, based on correspondence between the Minister and his State counterpart, Molly Robson, obtained under Freedom of Information legislation, as well as other openly obtainable documents, including Hansard reports.

He said all the information had been given by CAFNEC to the Cairns Post in repeated visits and letters before the editorial ran but was not published at that time. The main points had been printed later in major metropolitan and other newspapers.

Defending the editorial, the newspaper relied on a statement by the Queensland Premier that the developer had been given approvals. It also relied on a report that a scientific workshop set up by Senator Faulkner had reported there was not likely to be long[Dhatch]term environmental damage from the envisaged development.

The newspaper also made what appears to the Council to be a curious and contradictory pair of claims that CAFNEC was too close to the issue to be objective, and that CAFNEC was not given "all that much say" as "it was not directly involved."

It is not the Council's role to tell editors what they should or should not print, even though it believes that in this case had any of the information sent to the paper been published at the time of the Premier's statement, as it was elsewhere, readers' perceptions of the issue could have been altered.

But having the information in its possession and then writing an editorial based on premises that the information showed to be at best suspect, at worse false, the Cairns Post left itself open to the complaint of not presenting comment honestly and fairly.

Council principles say a newspaper is justified in strongly advocating its own views providing (among other things) that it does not misrepresent or suppress relevant facts. It is the Council view that the paper breached these tenets by its failure to publish facts that were vital to the editorial's balance.

On a separate issue relating to the above judgment, the Council criticised the CAFNEC coordinator for a press release issued by Mr Purcell on the eve of the Council hearing of the complaint.

The Council said the release, based on the fact that the Council had agreed to hear the CAFNEC complaint, went beyond fair comment. Part of it purported to summarise the Cairns Post arguments but in doing so omitted the main reasons given for the paper's actions, thus making the defence appear frivolous.