Adjudication No. 1256  (September 2004)

The Australian Press Council has dismissed a complaint from Perth City councillor Vincent Tan about a series of columns in The West Australian which questioned the bona fides and continued existence of a community organisation. But the Press Council expresses its concern that the columnist made insufficient effort to distinguish the organisation from another local association of a similar name.

Inside Cover, a daily feature on local issues and personalities, questioned the existence of the unincorporated Northbridge Business and Community Association (NBCA) and suggested that it was somehow an offshoot of an earlier Northbridge Businessmen's Association (NBA) which had been incorporated. The columnist relied on a former president of the NBA for part of his information. A day after the first mention of the issue in the column, the columnist interviewed Cr Tan at length on the issue of the NBCA's existence (or continued existence) and published extracts from that interview. There was subsequently a series of follow-up columns which dealt with the matter.

Six weeks after the first column, Cr Tan made a statement at the city council, in response to tabled questions, seeking to correct what he saw as the inaccuracies in the column. Two days later he wrote a letter of complaint to the newspaper's managing director and brought the matter to the Press Council. In his complaint, he argued that the columns had been unfair and unbalanced and that no attempts had been made to check the accuracy of the material. He said that he had contacted other reporters from the newspaper, seeking redress, but had not further approached the columnist nor submitted material to the editor in an attempt to correct any inaccuracies.

In response to the complaint, the newspaper first offered to resolve the matter through a mediation conducted by the Press Council. When Cr Tan decided against taking part in any mediation, the newspaper replied formally to the Press Council, defending the column's reporting. The newspaper argued that the matter was clearly one in the public interest and that the basis of the suggestion that the NBCA was defunct was derived from Cr Tan's own comments to the columnist. The newspaper also noted that Cr Tan had made no move to correct any misrepresentation which may have arisen from the column.

In the Press Council's view, the questions about the existence (or continued existence) of the NBCA, of which Cr Tan claims to be president and on behalf of which he claims to speak, were legitimate matters for the column to look at and comment on. The fact that, early in the coverage, the columnist gave Cr Tan ample opportunity to defend himself and devoted a column to his comments, indicates that there was an attempt to treat the councillor fairly. In the absence of any material from Cr Tan to the newspaper taking issue with the matters raised in the column and seeking redress, it is hard to see how the newspaper could have treated him more fairly. When presented with the opportunity of meeting with the newspaper to discuss the matter at a mediation hearing conducted under the Press Council's auspices, Cr Tan declined yet another opportunity to sort through what he claimed to be inaccuracies.

On the issue of whether the NBA became the NBCA, as claimed in the column, or was a separate organisation, as Cr Tan claims, the Press Council is of the view that the columnist made insufficient effort to determine whether the two organisations, with similar names, were related. This lack of clarity would have confused many readers and could have been avoided by more rigorous research.

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