Author: Denis Muller, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Advancing Journalism, The University of Melbourne

This piece is the final of a three part series on Australia’s defamation laws. You can read the other pieces here and here. Defamation laws exist to strike a balance between press freedom and the protection of people’s reputations from wrongful harm. In Australia, this balance has always been loaded against press freedom. This is due partly to the way the defamation laws have been framed and partly by the way the courts have interpreted them. Courts examine matters of journalism in the same way they examine matters of law: forensically, with strict rules and high standards of evidence and…