Uren v John Fairfax & Sons Pty Ltd (1966)

Abstract

In February 1963 Ivan Skripov, First Secretary of the Soviet Embassy in Australia, was declared persona non grata by the Australian government and was given a week to leave the country. Skripov was a KGB officer who had arrived in Australia in 1959 to re-establish the Soviet Embassy after it was disbanded in the wake of the Petrov affair in 1954. Skripov's connections to a number of Australian politicians, primarily from the left, was the context for articles in the press in early 1963 connecting the left-wing Federal member for Reid, Tom Uren, with Skripov, for which he sued for defamation. By the time the litigation finished six and a half years later, Skripov was the Soviet ambassador to Uganda and his attempt to destabilise Australian democracy had long been forgotten. But, no doubt unexpectedly for Skripov, his work did contribute to a challenge of another kind to orthodoxy: the nature of the relationship of the High Court of Australia and the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. Throughout the 1960s, the High Court began to openly decline to follow decisions of superior English courts, including the House of Lords. While the decision of the High Court to reject the limits on awards of exemplary damages in tort actions (including defamation) set out by Lord Devlin in Rookes v Barnard was not the first time the High Court had declined to follow a House of Lords decision, it was the first time the Privy Council had the opportunity to comment on the practice. In allowing diversity between the positions in Australia and England, the Privy Council not only drew attention to the competing rationales for awards of exemplary damages but also established a new framework for the relationship between the common law and its application in non-English jurisdictions.