On November 13, a public servant lodged defamation proceedings against MWM and the author of this story.
On January 30, we attended a case management hearing before Justice Nicholas Owens of the Federal Court of Australia.
We had already made a number of efforts to address the public servant’s concerns with his lawyers Alisa Taylor and Courtney Noble of Canberra law firm MV Law. These were ignored. We were instructed by Justice Owens to prepare a defence.
It was filed yesterday evening.
We believe the action is vexatious and without merit. Whether the Applicant has been defamed or not is for the Court to decide.
In order to fund the case, we undertook a crowdfunding campaign and surpassed the target of $40k in 24 hours then closed the offer at $48,666. We are deeply appreciative of the community support!
It is important that we are transparent. We pledged to make public the vexatious claim and legal correspondence in the matter, including our Defence.
The Defence has just been filed by Sharangan Maheswaran, Mark Davis and Jack Vaughan of XD Law and Advocacy.
Our legal defences are Contextual Truth, Truth, Public Interest and Qualified Privilege. The public servant has been a prolific social media poster mostly interested in Chinese interference in Australia.
His political campaigning included doxing people on Twitter who he believed were connected with the Chinese Communist Party.
In preparation for the story, The Manchurian Candidate, we examined many of the public servant’s 60,000 or so tweets, put questions to his lawyers from MV Law, spoke at length with a number of sources who had been distressed by the legal threats from MV Law and put questions to then DPS secretary Rob Stefanic. He responded for the story.
Along with four other publishers – Marcus Reubenstein, Suzy Cong, James Laurenceson and John Menadue – we had previously been threatened with defamation by the public servant.
Shoebridge takes DPS to task
On Monday morning, DPS was before Senate Estimates. Senator David Shoebridge questioned Deputy Secretary of the Department, Jaala Hinchcliffe, and other department bosses Nicola Hinder and Steven Fox, as well as Senate President Sue Lines about their knowledge of the public servant’s activities.
DPS was questioned over a lawsuit – a counter defamation claim against the public servant and the Department – from journalist Marcus Reubenstein which was settled in 2021 at a substantial cost to the Commonwealth.
The exchange between Shoebridge and Lines became heated. The DPS responses, though, were mostly to say they would take “questions on notice”, which means they did not know the answers at that time and would respond to the Senate later.
David Shoebridge grills Parliament Services on China tweeter
Michael West established Michael West Media in 2016 to focus on journalism of high public interest, particularly the rising power of corporations over democracy. West was formerly a journalist and editor with Fairfax newspapers, a columnist for News Corp and even, once, a stockbroker.