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House of Assembly - Fifty-Third Parliament, Second Session (53-2)
2015-02-25 Daily Xml
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Sampson Flat Bushfire

Ms REDMOND (Heysen) (15:31): I rise today to raise an issue of concern regarding the recent bushfire. During and following the Sampson Flat bushfires in early January 2015, the media took great pride in the fabulous job they did in providing coverage of the events. Indeed, in the days following, they could not praise each other enough for what a fabulous job they did in their reporting of the unfolding events. There is no doubt that much of their self-praise, though often said to be no recommendation, was well deserved and justified but it seems that, in their enthusiasm, at least one TV crew may have overstepped the mark.

I have spoken at some length to one of the victims of this fire—a lady who lost her house. This lady was at work when the events of Friday 2 January unfolded. She did receive one standard warning message from the CFS on her phone at eight minutes to four. It is believed that her house burned down between four and five. This timing can be fairly accurately pinpointed as her husband—a CFS member—was at home, and he was checking the CFS website on the computer when his neighbour phoned and said, 'Look out your window.' The fire was upon them and, in spite of his best efforts to defend the house, it could not be saved, nor, I understand, could the neighbour's house.

For obvious reasons, those in charge of fighting the fire put a cordon around the area so that no-one could enter. As a result, although she had obviously been told that without any doubt her home had been one of the ones lost to the fire, this lady was unable to go back there. Anyone who has ever been close to the devastation caused by such events knows that it really is important for people to return to their home and view the place, even pick through the rubble and find tiny pieces that might have survived, in order to begin the long, slow and very often painful path to recovery. Indeed, I would suggest that common sense and a modicum of empathy, even from those who have never been close to such events, would lead anyone to conclude that this is an important first step.

Imagine this lady's distress then when, on Sunday 4 January, still not being allowed to enter the active fireground, she went to a friend's place to borrow some clothes, because she had none, and there on Channel 9 was her house. The sight of this added greatly to her distress at an already extremely difficult situation. After all, if she could not be allowed to get in there to go to her own house, how on earth was Channel 9 able to do so, and how was it that they were able to show her house without any permission being sought or given? She subsequently found out that they had even shown this vision of her destroyed home on Saturday 3 January.

On Monday 5January, shortly after she did get to her house finally, who should turn up but Channel 9. The young female reporter asked to do an interview. After some consideration and discussion, the lady agreed to do an interview on camera but made it clear that she would only agree if she could say what she wanted to say because she wanted to express some concerns about notifications, aerial firefighting and so on. The young reporter agreed to the conditions.

The interview was done. The reporter's word was not worth the paper it was not written on, and a heavily edited version went to air deleting the parts this lady really wanted to say. I am prepared to put that aspect down to the inexperience of the reporter. For all I know, she did try to get the whole thing put to air and others higher up the food chain vetoed that. More importantly, however, and back to the original Channel 9 coverage of the event, why was this not a breach of the Journalists' Code of Ethics? I have taken the trouble to read the (so-called) Journalists' Code of Ethics and it begins with a general statement which includes the following:

Alliance members engaged in journalism commit themselves to

Honesty

Fairness

Independence

Respect for the rights of others

The relevant standard thereunder (No. 11) states:

Respect private grief and personal privacy. Journalists have the right to resist compulsion to intrude.

This statement is extraordinary in two outstanding respects: I am yet to meet or observe any journalist who does 'respect private grief and personal privacy'. Watching TV news or current affairs programs on any day soon gives the lie to this so-called standard but, secondly, the most extraordinary thing about this statement is the second sentence:

Journalists have the right to resist the compulsion to intrude.

Since when is an ethical obligation expressed in terms of the rights of person upon whom the obligation is imposed, not the rights of the person it is supposedly designed to respect? I have read codes of ethics of all sorts of occupations and professions over the years but never before have I seen anything couched in those terms.

But of course it does not matter to them how much distress they cause as long as they get their story. Indeed, they probably count greater distress as more newsworthy. The person I spoke to tells me that at least three or four other families had the same or a very similar experience and, of course, she spoke to me because she knows that making a complaint to people in the media will fall on deaf ears. It will not even get coverage; it will not lead to an apology and it certainly will not change their future behaviour. In my view, it is well past the time when we need privacy legislation in this state.

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