Thursday, 27 August 2026

 Georgie PURCELL (Northern Victoria) (22:13): (2754) My adjournment is for the Attorney-General and relates to the weaponisation of the legal system to silence activists, academics, journalists and victim-survivors. Recently I was very privileged to be invited to the Melbourne premiere of the powerful documentary Silenced featuring human rights lawyer Jennifer Robinson, Amber Heard and Brittany Higgins.

Research from the University of Sydney found that defamation concerns notices, the first formal step in a defamation claim, are being routinely used against victim-survivors who speak up about sexual harassment at work, and it found that the threat is frequently enough on its own to force a victim-survivor to stop. Australia is seriously lagging behind the rest of the world when it comes to protections against lawsuits to ensure free speech. The ACT is the only Australian jurisdiction with legislation to protect against strategic litigation against public participation through its Protection of Public Participation Act 2008. But even the Human Rights Law Centre has said that although it is ‘a commendable and crucial first step’, it is nonetheless ‘not fit for purpose’. Most European countries and American states have some kind of protection against SLAPPs. California, whose model is seen as the best and most tested worldwide, has had a robust anti-SLAPP statute since 1992, with specific protections for victim-survivors’ own accounts of gendered violence.

The government has done commendable work on the prevention of gendered violence and improving the way victim-survivors engage with our justice system. However, they must commit to robust SLAPP reform to ensure that victims-survivors can actually tell their stories in the first place. We need anti-SLAPP laws that allow early dismissal of meritless cases, shift the burden of proof to claimants, protect action against excessive costs and include a public interest defence and transparency mechanisms such as court reporting to track SLAPP cases. This is the exact sort of complex issue that the Victorian Law Reform Commission is designed to investigate. An inquiry led by them would ensure the work continues and a report is published, no matter who is elected to govern in November. The action that I seek is for the Attorney-General to refer the protection of public participation and the weaponisation of defamation law for an inquiry by the VLRC, because as Brittany says, ‘A problem we can’t talk about is a problem we can’t fix.’