Former Queensland Liberal MP Andrew Laming has won his High Court appeal against a $40,000 fine over three Facebook posts.<\/p>\n
He was accused of not properly identifying himself as a political candidate upon posting in the lead-up to the 2019 federal election.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Andrew Laming was the LNP member for Bowman when he made the Facebook posts on a page he administered titled “Redland Hospital: Let’s fight for fair funding”.<\/p>\n
The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) went after Mr Laming for failing to provide the correct authorisation required of political candidates in political communication.<\/p>\n
Under Australian electoral laws, MPs are required to give details, including their name and location, on any material that is aimed at influencing votes.<\/p>\n
Mr Laming admitted the posts lacked the required authorisation, but contested whether some of them fell into the category of political communication.<\/p>\n
Posts viewed 28 times\u00a0<\/p>\n
The original Federal Court judgment found some of the posts were clearly written by Mr Laming, having been signed by him, including a letter to a journalist, but others did not identify him as the writer or publisher.<\/p>\n
The judgment noted it was evident from the post “that Mr Laming was pretending it was posted by someone else”, even referring to himself in the third person.<\/p>\n
In the end, the case was narrowed down to three posts and Mr Laming was fined $20,000.<\/p>\n
But the AEC appealed and the fine was doubled to $40,000.<\/p>\n
That was to reflect the fact that the posts had been viewed 28 times.<\/p>\n
Mr Laming took it to the High Court, describing the reasoning as counterintuitive, saying he only made the omission once on each post.<\/p>\n
The AEC said the purpose of the law was to deter breaches and protect the rights of voters to make an informed choice.<\/p>\n
The commission told the High Court that on Mr Laming’s reasoning, any anonymous political publication would only result in a single contravention, no matter how harmful or wide-reaching it may be.<\/p>\n
But today the High Court ruled a line in the sand, saying there was a contravention each time the posts were published, not each time they were viewed.<\/p>\n
Mr Laming quit politics before the 2022 election after a series of unrelated controversies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Former Queensland Liberal MP Andrew Laming has won his High Court appeal against a $40,000 fine over three…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":64156,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[51327,51323,64,63,51326,51325,2667,2456,51328,51324,49264,44,84,44610,8935],"class_list":["post-64155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-australia","tag-aec","tag-andrew-laming-high-court","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-australian-electoral-commission","tag-bowman","tag-canberra","tag-facebook","tag-fed-pols","tag-former-mp","tag-lnp","tag-news","tag-politics","tag-post","tag-win"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64155"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64155\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}