Attack on press freedom
In an outrageous attack on freedom of the press, Westpac Bank last week obtained a NSW Supreme Court injunction against Tribune, requiring its publishers to surrender all 4000 copies of the weekly's February 20 edition by 10 a.m. on February 22. And just in case a copy or two was missed, Westpac even bought every copy it could find on the newsstands.
This suppression of the paper was ordered even though the material which it seeks to hide -- letters written to Westpac three years ago by legal firm Allen Allen and Hemsley -- are freely available in South Australian newspapers after the Democrats in that state's upper house read them into Hansard.
The letters are alleged to be relevant to lawsuits brought against Westpac by former borrowers of foreign currency loans who accuse a subsidiary of the bank of not warning them of the dangers of offshore loans and of mismanaging their liabilities. Westpac claims that publication of the letters violates both its copyright(!) and lawyer-client privilege.
What is really at stake, however, is freedom of the press and the right of the public to information. The affair shows that both of these rights can be overridden by anyone with enough money to hire expensive legal representation.
It also demonstrates how little the major parties are interested in defending our rights when these come into conflict with the demands of big money. On February 12, when Democrat Senator Paul McLean attempted to read the letters into Hansard, Labor's Kerry Sibraa, president of the Senate, gagged him. Both Labor and the opposition coalition parties in both houses have agreed to suppress the documents and remain silent.
The saga underlines the conditional nature of press freedom and free speech in this country, where only if you are rich enough can you afford to exercise that freedom -- and if you are even richer, you can stifle it.
