Peter Dutton to enter court-ordered mediation with Shane Bazzi in tweet defamation case
The defence minister, Peter Dutton, has been ordered to attend mediation after a federal court judge said his defamation case over a tweet calling him a “rape apologist” was not among the court’s biggest and could be settled pretrial.
Dutton is suing a refugee activist, Shane Bazzi, over the tweet, after vowing in March he would take a more aggressive stance against false and defamatory statements made about him online.
Bazzi denies he defamed Dutton with the tweet and pleads that, if he did, the defences of honest opinion and fair comment should apply.
At the first case management hearing on Wednesday, justice Richard White ordered the parties to attend mediation by 31 August and suggested the case could be settled without a trial, which he set down for three days in October in the event the matter was not resolved.
Bazzi said outside court he would be “happy to participate in that mediation process”. He has already deleted the tweet and committed not to repeat the claim – but Dutton has sought an apology and damages, pressing ahead with the case.
In the hearing, White said the case “would not be among the biggest defamation cases that come before this court”.
“This is a relatively narrow scope and I would have thought the parties, acting sensibly, should be able to achieve a compromise in such circumstances,” the judge said. He qualified his statement by acknowledging that he doesn’t “know all the things going on in the background”.
Dutton’s barrister, Nick Ferrett QC, said the former home affairs minister would give evidence at the trial “about the distress caused by the publication”. One or two unnamed witnesses were also expected to give evidence about Dutton’s reputation, the court heard.
The only potential witness in Bazzi’s case was the activist himself and that was still to be determined, his barrister, Louise Goodchild, said.
Both lawyers doubted any mediation before the trial would be successful but said their clients would happily participate if the court saw fit.
The judge urged both sides to approach the meeting with a court registrar with “a willingness to achieve a settlement and a willingness to make compromises”. Ferrett committed that Dutton would “approach the mediation bona fide”.
The case has been listed for a management hearing on 21 September with the potential trial to follow in early October.
Bazzi’s rape apologist claim was similar to an earlier statement by Greens Senator Larissa Waters. She has since retracted her claims and apologised. Bazzi’s tweet included a link to a 2019 Guardian Australia article reporting comments by Dutton that female refugees were “trying it on” by making claims they had been raped.
Dutton told Sky News that female refugees held on Nauru were claiming they needed to come to Australia for an abortion following rape, but changed their minds when they arrived. “You could question whether people needed medical attention,” he said at the time.
Bazzi argues the opinion in his tweet was based on that interview, as well as other public comments Dutton has made about refugees sent to Nauru.
The tweet was published on 25 February, at the height of the controversy surrounding former Liberal staffer Brittany Higgins’ allegation she was raped by a fellow Liberal staffer in the office of the defence industry minister in March 2019.
The same day Dutton revealed he did not disclose the Higgins’ allegation to the prime minister, Scott Morrison, and was quoted saying he “wasn’t provided with the ‘she-said, he-said’ details of the allegations”.
Bazzi’s defence also invokes the “she said, he said” comment to argue he had “proper material” on which to base his honest opinion, or that his tweet was a “fair comment” because it was “based on facts which were stated, sufficiently indicated or notorious”.