Adjudication No. 1466 (adjudicated July 2010) [2010] APC 16

Adjudication No. 1466 (adjudicated July 2010)

The Australian Press Council has considered a complaint that a report in The Mercury newspaper on 22 January 2010 substantially damaged the Ethics and Sustainability Party's attempt to register for the 2010 Tasmanian election.

The article, which highlighted complaints about the party's recruitment methods, paraphrased the Deputy Electoral Commissioner, Julian Type, as saying that registration required 100 signatures of party members on statutory declaration forms witnessed by a Justice of the Peace.

The party's Interim Secretary, Sven Wiener, complained that the article omitted to mention that the forms could also be witnessed by Commissioners of Declarations, who are much more plentiful in Tasmania than JPs. He said that this omission had "caused substantial damage" to the party's bid for registration because one of the two objections to registration mentioned the need for witnessing by a JP and thus was a direct result of The Mercury's reporting.

In reply, The Mercury acknowledged that Mr Type had told it that Commissioners of Declarations could be witnesses but unfortunately this had been omitted during sub-editing. It noted that the party's application for registration had been unsuccessful for reasons unrelated to the status of witnesses. It pointed out that Mr Type had subsequently told Mr Wiener that he did not attach any great weight to the omission and it also argued that the party had not shown a causal link between the article and the objection.

The Council considers it is clear that the principal complaint in the statement by the people who lodged the objection in question was that they had been asked to sign the declaration on the basis that it was an anti-pulp mill petition, rather than an application to join a new political party. They strongly believed they had been "fraudulently and unknowingly recruited as members". They raised the question of the lack of witnessing of their declaration by a JP only as a subsidiary point.

The Council concludes that, while regrettable, the newspaper's failure to mention the Commissioners of Declaration did not damage the party's registration attempt and was not a significant breach of the Council's principles requiring publications not to deliberately mislead or misinform readers by either omission or commission. Accordingly, the complaint is not upheld.