Adjudication No. 1424  (adjudicated June 2009)

The Press Council has upheld a complaint from Vivian Pak, a member of the NSW Community Relations Commission (CRC), that a report in The Sydney Morning Herald implied that she had sought a remunerative position on the body by contributing financially to a NSW minister's election campaign.

On February 25, 2009 the newspaper wrote that Ms Pak, a political donor to the Minister for Fair Trading, Virginia Judge, had been appointed by former premier, Morris Iemma, to the CRC in 2007.

The report said that Ms Pak and her firm, KP Lawyers, had donated more than $20,000 to Ms Judge's campaigns over the previous six years, and that her husband, Keith Kwon, the Mayor of Strathfield, had donated $15,506 to Ms Judge over the previous five years. A second report, the following day, quoted a former Labor mayor alleging that Ms Pak and her husband had contributed a total of $30,000 to Ms Judge's campaigns.

Both reports were follow-ups by the newspaper to its investigations into suspected political patronage of a corporation that donated $50,000 to Ms Judge's campaign funds.

Ms Pak said that the first report was unfair in its implied link of her donations to the CRC appointment, and the second report erred in that the Election Funding Authority's records showed that she and her husband, both members of the Labor Party, had donated only $21,856 since 2002. A further $10,000 donated by Ms Pak was to the Labor Party, not the minister.

Ms Pak said that the CEO of the CRC, Stepan Kerkyasharian, told her that, in an interview with the newspaper, he had explained that the process of appointing commissioners did not involve Ms Judge. This explanation did not appear in the February 25 article.

The newspaper argued that financial donations to political parties to gain government influence was an ongoing controversy in NSW politics and therefore of justified public interest. It said the report was aimed not at Ms Pak, but at Ms Judge and the Labor government that had appointed to a prestigious community body someone (Ms Pak) who had donated thousands of dollars to the Labor Party.

In this case, if the report did not imply, as the newspaper asserts, any wrongdoing by Ms Pak, then the unavoidable consequence is that Ms Pak became needlessly tainted by inclusion in the newspaper's investigations regarding Ms Judge.

The Council finds that in this respect the first report is unfair to Ms Pak, and that the second report inaccurately reported her and her husband's exact contribution to Ms Judge.

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