An animal rights group which took covert footage at a halal goat abattoir in rural Victoria has been ordered to pay $130,000 in damages to the facility.
In a Federal Court judgment delivered on 19 December, Farm Transparency International (FTI) was ordered to pay The Game Meats Company of Australia (GMC) general damages of $30,000 and exemplary damages of $100,000 over its trespass and filming at the abattoir in Eurobin earlier this year.
Seven times between January and April, FTI members crawled under a security fence at night, then installed and later collected covert video-recording equipment.
In May, FTI sent footage with a complaint of animal cruelty to the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, which forwarded it to GMC. A few days later, FTI sent the footage to Channel Seven, which then ran a story about the footage content (but did not republish the footage). FTI then posted the footage on the internet, with a media release and related commentary.
GMC obtained an order restraining FTI from publishing the footage, which was then removed from the internet.
The business then amended its originating application for orders to restrain FTI from publishing any video, to assign copyright to GMC, and for FTI to pay damages.
It argued the footage was obtained by trespassing; that the sharing of the footage breached Australian Consumer Law and was effected by malice; and that GMC should have copyright to the footage.
FTI argued relief was not available to GMC to protect it from the consequences of its own conduct, and such relief would “impermissibly burden the right that is impliedly conferred upon it by the Constitution to communicate freely about matters of politics or government”.
In his 69-page decision, Justice Snaden pointed to GMC’s adherence to Australian Standards, including the use of on-plant veterinarians who conducted periodic animal welfare audits and weekly meetings with abattoir management to discuss any animal welfare issues.
He also pointed to the trespassers taking no biosecurity precautions, and that their 100 hours of footage had been condensed into 14 minutes.
“Numerically, GMC was at pains to underline that the 14-minute footage depicted somewhere in the vicinity of 60 animals of the nearly 53,000 that it slaughtered over the period that FTI’s cameras were installed at the Eurobin premises,” he said.
“Even taking FTI’s claims at their highest, GMC maintains that it could not fairly be said on those numbers to operate indifferently to matters of animal welfare, nor with condoned or systematic animal cruelty.
“The evidence paints a reasonably clear picture. GMC is a sizeable, professional and reputable undertaking, which, at the very least, strives to operate in accordance with what the law expects…
“Any suggestion that it condones or is indifferent to animal suffering is or would be false, as would be the more serious suggestion that it is systematically cruel to the animals that it slaughters.”
Justice Snaden found injurious falsehood had not been proven by GMC, nor that the publications were effected by malice. He also found the copyright in the footage was not subject to a constructive trust.
He said a consideration in assessing general damages in this case was that the abattoir was well secured to protect the property and its operations.
Other considerations were that the trespasses “represented serious and determined invasions, which were repeated and regular, conducted late at night over several months”, subjected the facility to “potentially very serious biosecurity risks”, and involved deliberate damage.
“FTI appears to have reckoned that the movement that it champions excuses it from a basic custom observed throughout the civilised world; that the virtue of its purpose and the ‘investigations’ that it considers that that purpose demands somehow licence the deliberate, persistent, repeated and unrepentant invasion of the rights of others,” he said.
“Of that notion it must unambiguously be disabused.”
Justice Snaden said the evidence was clear that GMC was “but one in a long line of victims of FTI’s tortious conduct”.
“Other businesses have had – and yet others will very likely have – their premises invaded, presumably (as here) in the dead of night by masked vigilantes,” he said.
“They may have (or have had) holes drilled into buildings to accommodate hidden recording equipment, their operations exposed to potentially catastrophic biohazards and their staff unknowingly subjected to covert surveillance – not by accountable public servants acting with legitimate authority but by fanatical strangers who want them to lose their jobs.
“The general damages that I will impose will not come remotely close to what the court should hope to achieve by way of deterrence of conduct that is very plainly obnoxious to public conscience.
“I accept that an award of exemplary damages is necessary in this matter to give FTI pause to consider whether it should prefer lawful means of persuasion over those that it employed against GMC.
“It may well be that that is beyond what the court can realistically hope to achieve; but it is, nonetheless, an aspiration that should inform the relief that should be granted.”
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