Defamation law is designed to protect all Australians from false or damaging statements being made about them that may cause harm to their personal or professional reputation. It enables those who have been defamed to seek compensation for financial and other losses resulting from a defamatory publication of any kind.
As a result, in order to prove defamation five key elements must be at play.
- A statement of fact. …
- A published statement. …
- The statement caused injury. …
- The statement must be false. …
- The statement is not privileged. …
Does defamation have to be false?
Under common law, to constitute defamation, a claim must generally be false and must have been made to someone other than the person defamed. Some common law jurisdictions also distinguish between spoken defamation, called slander, and defamation in other media such as printed words or images, called libel.
You may often hear the terms ‘libel‘ or ‘slander‘ used in the media. These are both actionable torts that have caused damage to a person’s reputation. … This is because you can‘t technically sue someone for libel or slander in Australia, as these legal actions no longer exist.
A publication’s defamatory meaning is determined by what an ordinary, reasonable and fair minded reader (or listener) understands when receiving the comments, taken as a whole. A natural and ordinary meaning may include implications and inferences: Jones v Skelton [1963] 1 WLR 1362.
The defamatory sting of a publication will sometimes not lie so much in the words themselves but what an ordinary person will infer from them, which is also regarded as part of their natural and ordinary meaning: Lewis v Daily Telegraph [1964] AC 234.
