Adjudication No. 833 (January 1996) [1996] APC 6

ADJUDICATION No. 833 (January 1996)

The Australian Press Council has dismissed a complaint by the Federal President of the Australian Liberal Students' Federation (ALSF) against The Sydney Morning Herald over a bylined column about his organisation.

Under the headline "Taste of extremism on menu for young WA Libs", in the paper's 2 August 1995 edition, the bylined journalist wrote a colourful critique of the West Australian branch of the ALSF.

Describing the ALSF generally as being on the conservative side of the Liberal Party, he wrote, among other things, that the WA branch opposed Aboriginal land rights and voting rights for non-propertied people and that its annual conference dinner toasted Jacques Chirac, Arthur Tunstall and the Queen.

While the column was mainly about attitudes and activities within the WA branch, it also referred to the complainant being elected at "a farcical national meeting of the ALSF" at which he alleged neither Queensland nor Victoria attended "as a result of alleged rorts to the accreditation..."

Mr Robertson complained that the column breached several Press Council principles, including failure to make amends for damaging his and the organisation's reputation.

As instances of breaching principles regarding accuracy, a newspaper's duty to take all reasonable steps to ensure the truth of its statements and its obligation to identify rumours and unconfirmed reports, if they are printed at all, he listed several parts of the article.

They include references to the ALSF "welcoming" members of the National Front, National Action (both far-right groups) and neo-Nazi organisations, and alleged links with the League of Rights.

The newspaper and the writer strenuously defended the column and said that numerous people within the ALSF had confirmed the information before it was written and that efforts were made to contact the complainant and others, but they had "proved remarkably hard to contact".

They also argued that the complainant had misconstrued points made in the article.

One of Mr Robertson's complaints was that the writer should have contacted him, as federal president, before writing about the organisation. The writer insists that he tried to make such contact.

In this case, it is irrelevant if the writer did or did not try to contact the complainant. It was clearly a bylined column of opinion based on well-researched material which the paper was entitled to publish.

Nor was there an obligation on the paper to publish a letter from Mr Robertson, which it regarded as misleading. However, the Council believes it should have been possible for the parties to negotiate a publishable letter.

The newspaper did acknowledge one error in the column, a mistake the Press Council believes was minor, and addressed it by promptly publishing a correcting letter from several presidents of Student Liberal clubs. They said that they had refused to attend ALSF conferences in Perth because of the federation's "failure to represent mainstream Liberal values as demonstrated by the outrageous policies referred to in the article".