Adjudication No. 1192 (March 2003)

The Press Council has dismissed a complaint against the Eaglehawk Times about a report entitled "Time to take action on bad tenants" and "'The tenants from hell' worry landlord". It referred to "a middle aged woman with a small dog" as an example of a problem tenant whose eviction was difficult to achieve under current tenancy legislation. The article did not name the complainant but did identify her landlord and described one problem tenant in one of three Eaglehawk rental properties owned by the landlord. It went on to describe the circumstances of the complainant's tenancy leading to her eviction.

The complainant believes that the article was unbalanced, inaccurate, blurred fact and opinion and was in breach of the Council's privacy principles in that it was sufficient to identify her and therefore adversely affected her ability to secure new rental accommodation after her eviction by the named landlord.

The paper maintains that the description in the article could have applied to some 50 tenants in the area, and that the article was fair.

In a regional community such as Eaglehawk, the risk of identification is higher than in a metropolitan circulation area. Nonetheless, the Council is of the view that the paper took sufficient steps to preserve the complainant's anonymity Given the circumstances and the need for the newspaper to preserve the complainant's anonymity, the Council found no breach of its principles on fairness.

return to
Adjudication index

[ return to top ]

Documents with the icon require the Acrobat Reader, a Free Utility from Adobe. Click here for more information.