10. SLAPP Suits

Hi, I’m Greg and I want to grumble about SLAPP suits. SLAPP stands for Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation. The name is American, but unfortunately law suits against activists voicing community concern are alive and well in Australia.

Perhaps the most famous Australian example was the Gunns 20 case where the Tasmanian timber giant Gunns sued Bob Brown, The Wilderness Society and 18 others over protests against logging old growth forests. The case dragged on for five years before it finally collapsed with Gunns having trashed their own reputation and paid over a million dollars in court costs.

But there have been other cases. In South Australia environmentalists got sued for saying a developer was chasing “fool’s gold”, and for saying that you would have to have “rocks in your head” if you wanted to build a housing estate in a particular place. And then there were the animal activists sued over a T-shirt about battery hens, and the social justice activists sued for saying that there had not been adequate consultation with Aboriginal people over a particular project.

I grumble about this because I spent 10 years of my life defending these cases, but I was a lot more than grumbling last week when I heard that the Victorian Supreme Court had just slapped injunctions on protesters who had been blocking the building of a new McDonald’s at Tecoma in the hills outside of Melbourne. Now I don’t know the protesters, or whether their concerns about local businesses, culture and environment, healthy diets, or the rights of the local community are widely held or well-founded, but I do know that they have a right to effectively protest the burger-isation of their town. Such political issues should be sorted out in public debate, not by a court process where a global corporation has all the resources and rights.

But what is even more outrageous in this case was that the judge made a “representative order” – effectively gagging whole groups of protesters who were not even parties to the case. So, if you were one of those protesters upset by this particular Hamburglar and you now go to protest by symbolically occupying the site for say 10 minutes, you might not only be charged with trespass by the Police, you could be sued for tens of thousands of dollars and be guilty of contempt of court to boot!

I blame McDonald’s, and I blame the judge and the lawyers, and I blame the legal system that makes court cases so expensive and stressful. But mostly I want to see legislation to ban such attacks on the right to protest, and no, I won’t have fries with that!

I am Greg, and I am grumbling.


This Grumble can be heard online or by podcast at https://radio.adelaide.edu.au/gregs-grumbles-10/

First Broadcast: 8 October 2013