Anderson v Nationwide News Pty Ltd

The case of Anderson v Nationwide News Pty Ltd was heard in the Federal Court of Australia. The plaintiff, Anderson, sought to bring a defamation claim against the defendant, Nationwide News Pty Ltd, the publisher of the 'Sunday Tele­graph' newspaper. Anderson claimed that the defendant's publication of a series of articles defamed him. The defendant sought to strike out certain imputations contained in the statement of claim, asserting that they were not reasonably capable of being inferred from the articles in question.

The court was required to determine whether the imputations pleaded in the statement of claim were supported by the articles published by the defendant. Specifically, the court had to consider whether these imputations could be reasonably inferred from the articles, or whether they were entirely speculative or hypothetical. The defendant argued that the imputations were not supported by the articles, and thus should be struck out as they did not form part of the cause of action.

In its judgment, the court held that the imputations pleaded in the statement of claim were not supported by the articles published by the defendant. The court found that the imputations were not reasonably capable of being inferred from the articles, and were therefore not part of the cause of action. The court reasoned that the articles did not explicitly or implicitly convey the imputations as pleaded by the plaintiff. Consequently, the court granted the defendant's application to strike out the unsupported imputations. The court found that the remaining imputations were sufficient to sustain the defamation claim.