Comments on: Media and privacy II: we need a bill of rights http://www.crikey.com.au/2008/08/13/media-and-privacy-ii-we-need-a-bill-of-rights/ now with extra source Sun, 12 Feb 2012 00:58:05 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 By: Tom McLoughlin http://www.crikey.com.au/2008/08/13/media-and-privacy-ii-we-need-a-bill-of-rights/#comment-13943 Tom McLoughlin Thu, 01 Jan 1970 10:00:00 +0000 #comment-13943 At the risk of wanting an argument more than a hot dinner .... as queasy as I am about pestilient paps and press nosing through rubbish bins and personal/s+x life of even public figures, and opportunistically abusing their power in their endless vendettas ... I just wonder about a rich guy's preferred fantasy in a country with the BNP, and racialist foreign/war policy being a hot topic of debate. <br /><br />What if a top sports administrator in Australia started having Baath Party orgies here pretending to be Soeharto or Saddam? Or Burmese Junta ones? Do we need to know? Does that tip the voyeurist and the lurid over into the public interest sphere?<br /><br />I just did a bit of googling and it seems the court decision specifically rejected the allegation by News of the World that his romp involved Nazi overtones. Given his germanic looks it was a plausible sensational lie to make. One wonders this was fatal to the newspaper's case. But in different circumstances a public figure's private life might become public interest as suggested above - like Reba Meagher allegedly wasting the public's money on a govt driver on call all night: <br /><br />I can imagine the private and public interest becomes hopelessly mixed at times. As for the use of privacy to censor public interest in animal rights - that legal decision still strikes me as wrong and perverse. Trespass for sure, maybe (not conceding) tortious interference in contractual/commercial relations. But privacy in an industrial abattoir setting? That's a joke. At the risk of wanting an argument more than a hot dinner …. as queasy as I am about pestilient paps and press nosing through rubbish bins and personal/s+x life of even public figures, and opportunistically abusing their power in their endless vendettas … I just wonder about a rich guy’s preferred fantasy in a country with the BNP, and racialist foreign/war policy being a hot topic of debate.

What if a top sports administrator in Australia started having Baath Party orgies here pretending to be Soeharto or Saddam? Or Burmese Junta ones? Do we need to know? Does that tip the voyeurist and the lurid over into the public interest sphere?

I just did a bit of googling and it seems the court decision specifically rejected the allegation by News of the World that his romp involved Nazi overtones. Given his germanic looks it was a plausible sensational lie to make. One wonders this was fatal to the newspaper’s case. But in different circumstances a public figure’s private life might become public interest as suggested above - like Reba Meagher allegedly wasting the public’s money on a govt driver on call all night:

I can imagine the private and public interest becomes hopelessly mixed at times. As for the use of privacy to censor public interest in animal rights - that legal decision still strikes me as wrong and perverse. Trespass for sure, maybe (not conceding) tortious interference in contractual/commercial relations. But privacy in an industrial abattoir setting? That’s a joke.

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