The student at the centre of a recent controversy around the Racial Discrimination Act, Calum Thwaites, has claimed Labor MP Terri Butler has further defamed him in her public reaction to news reports about his defamation suit against her.
On Thursday it was reported that Thwaites was suing Butler for defamation following comments she made on the ABC's Q&A on Monday night.
Butler had questioned whether Thwaites had been behind a Facebook post that used the word “n-ggers” in relation to an Indigenous computer lab. That Facebook post was at the centre of a long running dispute under section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act.
A federal court judge earlier this month dismissed the case between Thwaites, two other students and an Aboriginal administrative officer at the Queensland University of Technology, and accepted Thwaites' claim that the "n-ggers" post was made from a fake account in his name.
Butler's comments on Q&A led to Thwaites lodging a defamation suit in Brisbane Magistrates Court, arguing his reputation had been damaged by the Labor MP's comments.
In the email sent to Butler on Wednesday – which she insists she did not receive – Queensland barrister Anthony Morris QC, representing Thwaites, said he was escalating the defamation proceeding and not giving her a formal “concerns notice”, because of Butler’s reaction on Twitter to an opinion piece written by journalist Hedley Thomas published in The Australian on Tuesday.
“The article by Mr Heley (sic) Thomas sets out, as clearly as any ‘concerns notice’, the defamatory imputations arising from your remarks on Q&A,” reads the email.
“And your ‘Twitter’ response makes it clear that you do not intend to acknowledge that anything you said was ‘factually inaccurate’, to offer any retraction or apology, or otherwise to make amends for your defamatory remarks.
“On my advice, Mr Thwaites has concluded that – in light of your ‘Twitter’ response, and given that you are admitted as a solicitor and previously practised as such in Queensland – it is unnecessary to issue a ‘concerns notice’ in accordance with section 14 of the Defamation Act 2005.”
On Friday, Morris sent a second email to the Labor MP.
Morris told Butler that her reaction to the story, questioning whether the defamation suit was hypocritical within the context of a debate around free speech and 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, was a “fresh defamation” against his client.
“This fresh defamation, accusing Mr Thwaites of hypocrisy, is plainly relevant as a (further) exacerbation of damages,” reads the email from Morris.
“It is also factually false: on no occasion has Mr Thwaites asserted that "the problem with this country is there's not enough free speech"; indeed, the record will show that he has not made a single reference to "free speech" or "freedom of speech" on any of the four occasions that he has spoken publicly since the decision dismissing the section 18C claim against him; and his public comments regarding section 18C have been confined solely to explaining how this badly-drafted law operated oppressively in his particular case.”
Butler said she's received Morris's email relating to the fresh defamation claims and will now "consider its contents".
The tweet the barrister is referring to was sent on Tuesday and reads: “I see the @australian is asserting I have been factually inaccurate, while describing me as a class action lawyer, which I've never been.”
I see the @australian is asserting I have been factually inaccurate, while describing me as a class action lawyer, which I've never been.
Butler told BuzzFeed News she was never sent Hedley Thomas’s opinion piece, which was titled “Terri Butler ignorant over facts of QUT racial hatred case”, and said it does not “state the defamatory imputations” as claimed by the lawyer’s email, which she never received.
“It was not given to me by anyone, let alone an aggrieved person – I saw it on Twitter then had to track down a non-paywalled version to read it,” said Butler in a statement.
“It does not state the defamatory imputations that Mr Thwaites considers are or may be carried about Mr Thwaites.
"So I am not sure why Mr Morris would think it was an adequate substitute for a concerns notice.”