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 A letter writer who falsely claimed gay men were having sex on Mission Beach, and that vigilante posses had formed to deter them, has been ordered to pay costs estimated to be in excess of $100,000 after the Anti-Discrimination Tribunal ruled the letter vilified gays.
Newspaper editor Michael Wilkes, 63, will also have to pay the same amount in costs after he published Ross Woodley’s pseudonymous letter in a November 2003 edition of the Mission Beach Advertiser under the headline: ‘Poofters Beware!’
The case is only the second successful anti-vilification case undertaken in Australia, and the first to be prosecuted by a community group, Townsville’s GLBT Anti-Violence Council (AVC).
AVC spokesperson Colin Edwards told Queensland Pride a Mission Beach resident was unable to prosecute the case for fear of “retribution affecting their employment”. Edwards said he hoped the case would put pressure on other states to allow organisations to prosecute vilification cases.
“The case is serious because the letter announced that the Mission Beach community had gathered for a meeting and that with the community’s consent from an election, homosexuals as a people were banned from Mission Beach. This meeting also vilified homosexuals as being a danger to children and families,” Edwards said.
At the time the AVC issued a national public safety warning and made a complaint to Queensland Police alleging “incitement to violence”.
“An investigation team from Cairns conducted a wide investigation and recommended to the Department of Public Prosecutions that criminal sanctions be issued against the letter writer and the editor. This file is still on the desk of the DPP.” He said the DPP had not notified the AVC why it has not prosecuted the case.
Wilks, who defended himself at the Tribunal hearings, said he believed the fair reporting provisions of the Anti-Discrimination Act protected his right to publish the letter. However, Tribunal Member Douglas Savage SC found there was “no evidence at all” the letter was a fair report and that Wilks had made no attempt to ascertain whether the letter was true.
Savage said the letter expressly portrayed “an intolerance of homosexuals and incites people to express that intolerance by demanding homosexuals leave the beaches around Mission Beach and inviting members of the public to assault or otherwise take action against those people if they decline to move on”.
He said that while he was concerned the “entirely fictitious” letter “could not be taken seriously by reasonable members of the community”, its publication “objectively incites” people who are “reluctantly tolerant” of homosexuals to “cease tolerance and proceed down the path of hatred, ridicule and contempt”.
In his Tribunal-ordered apology, Wilks said he should have appreciated that printing the letter was wrong. “The correct thing would have been to alert the police to these threats to the safety and liberty of homosexuals,” he wrote. “The edited version of the letter that was published in Mission Beach Advertiser mentioned threats against homosexuals, the details of which were not printed in the newspaper, but which I knew consisted of cruel and violent assaults on homosexuals by posses.”
In his apology, Woodley admitted his suggestion of vigilante gangs was “an invention” that could harm tourism in the area. Woodley has since moved to New South Wales.
Anti-Discrimination Commissioner Susan Booth said the case showed the anti-vilification laws were working. “It’s also a warning that people who vilify will be brought before the Tribunal and will be found to have vilified,” Booth said.
The case remains subject to a possible appeal.
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