Life without reputation
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 5: Addicted to Celebrity
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Margaret Simons
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Margaret Simons' biography and other articles by this writer
I have heard some significant gossip about the Howard Government Attorney-General, Philip Ruddock. Or rather, since I heard it from two reliable and independent sources, I can elevate what I heard and call it a fact. This is how journalists, when we are working prudently, negotiate what is sayable and what is not. Fact, fact, fact, like bricks in a wall, each with its little footing of evidence. If an article is checked by a lawyer before publication then each fact, and the whole assemblage, will be scrutinised for unintended and unprovable meanings. Because sometimes, as we all know, a wall of bricks can be more than the sum of its parts. When you are sued for defamation you are called upon to prove the truth not of what you intended to say, but rather of any meanings the reader might have drawn. The issue is always what people thought you meant, not what you intended to say.
And so I should say at once that there was nothing improper in what I heard about Philip Ruddock – merely a collision between the personal and the institutional, between the Attorney-General and the man. Which is, of course, what makes it so fascinating.
HERE IS THE GOSSIP. IN RECENT BRIEFINGS ON HIS PROPOSED new national defamation law, Ruddock has revealed that he is being driven partly by memories of his father. Ruddock proposes making it possible for the dead to sue – or rather for their relatives to take action up to three years after their deaths. Asked why he was persisting with this idea, Ruddock talked about his father, Max Ruddock, and how awful it had been, many years ago, to tolerate attacks on his reputation when he was no longer around to defend himself.
Max Ruddock was a Liberal MP in the NSW Parliament, where he was on the backbench for years, not apparently favoured by the powerbrokers of the Askin Government. He was by all accounts, a talented, charismatic and sometimes fierce man. Former NSW Liberal MP Milton Morris remembers him as so dogmatic that by comparison his son seems malleable, "or at least better able to see the other point of view". Colleagues remember he lived for politics and for his family, in particular his son Philip.
In an interview late last year, Ruddock told me, "Dad was a person with very strong views. A person you either intensely liked or disliked. I had a strong bonding with him because he would take up issues with strength. He had high expectations, was proud of what had been achieved but wanted you to do better. I think I understood that." Of his own elevation to Attorney-General, Philip Ruddock said: "I think if Dad was here today he'd be sitting there scratching his head and saying ‘I still wonder how he did it'."
Philip Ruddock has long since surpassed his father's achievements. Max Ruddock never quite got an even break. He was made a minister just months before his death. To top all this, he fought all his life against a degenerative muscle disease that, by the time he entered parliament, made walking difficult and, Morris remembers, gave him a waddling gait.
When I asked Ruddock whether his father was harsh to him as a boy, he denied it. "No. Not harsh ... He would defend his kids with the utmost vigour but if you had done anything wrong he would take to you for having failed to observe the appropriate standards."
Physically or verbally?
Ruddock gave a Boris Karloff smile, and said: "In my family people have always used their minds as a weapon." It was a chilly moment in our interview.
Robert Askin himself, of course, was the subject of one of the most notorious cases of defamation of the recently dead. The day before his funeral, The National Times published allegations that he was corrupt. It was sayable in print because he was no longer living, although barely cold. The rumour and gossip that had been circulating for years was suddenly officially (though controversially) sayable.
But back to Philip Ruddock. Both my sources, who were at his briefings, gained the impression that a large part of Ruddock's motivation for the changes he intends to make is personal. Ruddock proposes to restrict the defence of fair comment, which now protects most fact-based expressions of opinion, so that "prejudiced, biased and grossly exaggerated opinions will receive no protection". Although Ruddock wept no tears and showed no explicit vulnerability, my sources both gained the impression that he had been stung by the criticism of his role in his previous portfolio of Immigration. One said: "He blinked a lot and his lips were all stiff."
This also squares with what Ruddock said in his interview with me last year. When I asked him about the so-called cash-for-visas affair, he threatened me with a writ and implied he might also sue members of the Opposition if they continued to raise the matter. When I challenged him on this later, he insisted he would never use defamation but he didn't want the Opposition to know that he wouldn't. "And there are limits. People need to know there is always a risk," he said.
One last thing about Ruddock. Most commentators have assumed that the discussion paper proposing reforms to defamation is loosely put together and that not much determination lies behind the proposed changes. Ruddock gave those who attended his briefings quite a different impression. He seemed determined to push it through, and quickly. The next stage will be draft legislation. If the Howard Government is still in office, the legislation will be before Parliament before the end of the year.
NO SANE JOURNALIST COULD CLAIM TO LIKE DEFAMATION LAW. It causes too many sleepless nights and obsessive anxiety about meaning – intended and unintended. Most of the real story of defamation takes place a long way from the courts. My first experience with it was as a cadet journalist. I had written a "soft" story about a champion teenage violin player living in Horsham, Victoria. I had said he was considered "eccentric" because he preferred to practise violin than to kick a footie with his mates. His mother threatened action. She thought I was implying he was homosexual. Of course no action resulted. This wasn't serious. But I don't doubt the reality of her outrage.
More seriously, a good journalist can't avoid defaming people. Most journalism worth reading is potentially defamatory. I, like most other journalists of any longevity, can tell stories about the articles that didn't make it to print.
Like this one, which I worked on in the late 1980s: a well-known property developer, a friend, confidante and sponsor of one of the nation's most prominent politicians, was in business with an organised-crime figure. This story is true in its import, but could not be published because in another sense it was not "true". The property developer was a director of a company that owned a hotel and employed the staff of the hotel. The organised-crime figure was a director of a different company that owned the licence for the hotel. If the story had been published, both men would certainly have sued, and so would the politician. The evidence wasn't actually proof of their being "in business together", because they did not share a company. The story never caused a blip on the legal radar screen.
Then there are all the little magazines that cannot even dream of publishing very controversial stuff, even if it is true. Just the cost of responding to legal letters is beyond their reach. A book publisher once told me that what he feared most was the sight of his own lawyer's letterhead coming through the fax machine, and the thought of what it had cost for the letter to be written.