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The Federal Court has ordered that secret parts of the ABC’s written defence to a defamation suit brought against it by cabinet minister Christian Porter should be scrubbed from its public records, effectively preventing the document from being accessed by the public.
Federal Liberal MP Christian Porter.
Credit:Alex Ellinghausen
As part of a settlement deed, the ABC and Mr Porter agreed to seek a court order that 27 pages of the ABC’s 37-page defence to his claim “be permanently removed from the court file”. The pages are redacted in the publicly available version of the defence.
A temporary suppression order over the 27 pages was made by Justice Jayne Jagot in May, pending an anticipated pre-trial application by Mr Porter to strike them out and remove them from the file on the basis that they contained “scandalous” and “vexatious” material, or material that was “otherwise an abuse of the process”. That application fell away when Mr Porter agreed to drop the case.