Then there is the matter of the individual against a taxpayer-funded institution. Anderson told Senate estimates on March 23 that the ABC was self-insured in relation to defamation. In other words, any payments made, or costs incurred, in a defamation case are not covered by an insurance company. Rather, they come out of the ABC’s budget – meaning they are borne by taxpayers who fund the ABC to the tune of more than $1 billion a year.
The ABC has almost unlimited resources to defend libel cases, with a large in-house legal team and access to the best external barristers and solicitors that money can buy.
This would be bad enough if management ran the ABC. But it’s worse than that since staff activists, who effectively run the public broadcaster, can rely on the taxpayer to defend them against libel writs – even when they cannot sustain a case beyond reasonable doubt or to the lesser standard of the balance of probabilities.
