Peter Dutton Shane Bazzi

Refugee advocate Shane Bazzi has won an appeal overturning a decision that would have forced him to pay Defence Minister Peter Dutton more than $35000 over ...

“They arrived in Australia and then decided they were not going to have an abortion. “A person who defends another’s position expresses support or justification for it. “The reader would not gain the impression that the tweet conveyed two messages,” the judgement said. The justices rejected an argument by Mr Dutton that Mr Bazzi’s words should be read independently of the Guardian reporting, saying the “six word statement is anchored to the balance of the tweet”. Rather, “the reader would conclude that the tweet was suggesting that Mr Dutton was sceptical about claims of rape and in that way was an apologist”, the judges said. “The tweet no doubt conveys an impression that is derogatory and critical of Mr Dutton’s attitude to rape or rape allegations, but it does not go so far as to convey the impression that Mr Dutton is a person who excuses rape.”

Refugee advocate Shane Bazzi brought the appeal after being ordered by the federal court in November to pay $35000 in damages to the defence minister.

“Those who did read the Guardian article for which Mr Bazzi provided the link (it seems only a small percentage), would have seen that it did not provide support for Mr Bazzi’s pungent assessment.” The court concluded: “It is not sufficient that the tweet was offensive and derogatory. But that is very different from imputing that he excuses rape itself.” The tweet was removed shortly after Dutton wrote to Bazzi and the court found that “ordinary reasonable readers of the tweet would not have understood it to be the measured assessment of a serious political commentator”. “The reader would read on to absorb, in the fleeting way a reader of a tweet does, the content of the Guardian material. “When that material is read with Mr Bazzi’s six words, the reader would conclude that the tweet was suggesting that Mr Dutton was sceptical about claims of rape and in that way was an apologist.

Refugee advocate Shane Bazzi has won his Federal Court appeal after a judge earlier found he had defamed Defence Minister Peter Dutton in a six-word tweet.

In our opinion, he failed ..." "Mr Dutton had the onus to establish, on the balance of probabilities, that the reader reasonably would have understood that the tweet conveyed the imputation that he asserted it conveyed. But the three appeal judges said on Tuesday while the broad impression was that the tweet was derogatory about Mr Dutton, an "ordinary reasonable reader" would not gain the impression that it conveyed that he excused rape.

The panel of three Federal Court judges said "the judgement entered for Mr Dutton in the sum of $35825 mus...

In its judgement, the panel of three Federal Court judges said: "the primary judge erred in his reasoning process because he did not explain how the reader would understand the whole (or any part) of the tweet to convey the imputation. "Fighting this case has taken a strenuous toll on me and has been very stressful for me and my family," Bazzi said. "This case was not just about me. A really significant win for political discourse in this country," he said. The meaning his Honour found for the word "apologist" was not that of an excuser but of a defender". In September 2021, Dutton sued Bazzi over a six-word tweet, published on February 25, that he claimed accused him of being a "rape apologist".