TRISH HARGREAVES AND MARIE O’BRIEN AGAINST THE POST
Case Number: 3550
Council Meeting: 9 September 2024
Decision: Not Upheld
Publication: The Post
Principle:
Accuracy, Fairness and Balance
Corrections
Ruling Categories:
Court Reporting
Defamation/Damaging To Reputation
Overview
- On 11 March 2024, The Post published a story headed, The man sent to prison over wetlands that never existed. Separate complaints were received from Trish Hargreaves and Marie O’Brien. Because of their similar nature, these complaints have been considered together. Combined, there are claims the article breaches Principles (1) Accuracy, Fairness and Balance, (4) Comment and Fact, (5) Columns, Blogs, Opinion and Letters and (12) Corrections. The Council considered the complaint under Principles (1) and (12). The complaint is not upheld.
The Article
- This piece reports on a complex legal matter resulting in a Court of Appeal decision overturning charges against Mr Adrian Page and Ms Julie Crosbie. Those charges were brought against the couple by the Greater Wellington Regional Council (the council) largely in relation to damage to what the council had identified as wetlands on Ms Crosbie’s Kapiti Coast rural property.
- Ms Crosbie had bought the rundown 11-hectare life-style property with a view to raising cattle and building a home for her and her partner, Mr Page. In clearing the property and creating vehicle tracks Mr Page said he noticed effluent leaking from a septic tank drainage field from the neighbouring subdivision and complained to the council. On visiting the property, the council officer noticed what he thought to be wetlands and told Mr Page to stop work and to fence them off.
- Mr Page rejected the council’s designation of the wetlands and refused to fence them off, so the council issued Mr Page and Ms Crosbie abatement notices, and following, the Environment Court made interim orders for work to stop on the property. These orders were ignored and in June 2020, 34 charges were laid at Porirua District Court against Mr Page for ongoing damage to the wetlands and the sewage disposal system he had originally complained about. As the landowner Ms Crosbie was charged with allowing the offences to occur.
- Mr Page defended both himself and Ms Crosbie in the District Court. He did not call any expert witnesses and they were found guilty, with Mr Page sentenced to three months imprisonment. Ms Crosbie was fined $118,750.
- The article describes the toll that the four-year long process took on them, particularly for Ms Crosbie. She was working for the Police at the time and was disciplined for bringing her employer into disrepute and lost out on a promotion and long-service leave. She says she was traumatised by the hearing and blind-sided when Mr Page was sentenced to imprisonment. Ms Crosbie has been unable to visit the farm since she suffered a panic attack at the first visit of the council to the property. They both say that they were vilified by the media and the community and abused by neighbours. Ms Crosbie said that they became local pariahs.
- The story says Mr Page admits he is a stubborn and unsympathetic character who suffers from Attention Deficit Disorder and is prone to arguing. He had previously lost a decade-long feud with Whanganui District Council over clearing vegetation. This matter led to him becoming the Environment Court’s first vexatious litigant.
- The article links this case to a similar matter being heard in the Environment Court at the same time. Mr Stuart Adams had received approval from Upper Hutt City Council for a housing development. The Greater Wellington Regional Council ordered the works to be stopped on the grounds that it believed that there were wetlands that needed protection. This was dismissed in the Environment Court because “council staff failed to prove either the wetlands existed nor were not exempted from protection”. Awarding costs, the judge, who also presided over the Page/Crosbie case in the District Court, said that the council proceedings were “groundless at the most basic and fundamental level” and “totally devoid of merit in the absence of substantive evidence supporting the case it sought to make”.
- While Mr Page was unsuccessful in appealing the convictions at the High Court, sometime later, with legal representation, the Court of Appeal granted an appeal on the basis that because Mr Page hadn’t called experts in the original trial there was a risk of a miscarriage of justice.
- The crux of the Page/Crosbie appeal was whether wetlands were occurring naturally or had been man-made. The council methods of identifying wetlands were under scrutiny and failed to convince the court of their accuracy, so were unable to prove the existence of wetlands beyond reasonable doubt. All charges related to the wetlands were dismissed. Other charges, not related to the wetlands, were yet to be considered.
The Complaint
- Both Ms Hargreaves and Ms O’Brien complain that they did not receive any response from The Post on making their initial complaints – Ms Hargreaves on 18 March and Ms O’Brien on 19 March. Ms Hargreaves attributes the lateness of her formal complaint to the lack of response from the Post.
- Ms O’Brien’s complaint was sent to newstips@stuff.co.nz and complains that the article does not accurately portray what has happened in her community regarding Mr Page and Ms Crosbie. She says that “it is a positive piece written about a hectic neighbour winning one of a handful of charges laid against him for multiple offences”. She believes the article “has made us look like a bunch of moaning neighbours” and that “we have been really slated in this article”.
- In her initial complaint to The Post she asks that she be given the opportunity to “put some things straight in terms of what had been portrayed in the article.” She gives a number of examples of what she says is Mr Page’s abusive, offensive and destructive behaviour and says that overall “he has really made the last 4-5 years quite unpleasant”.
- She believes the article is not accurate, is an opinion and is poorly researched.
- Ms Hargreaves’ complaint was sent to the journalist directly, to newstips@stuff.co.nz and copied to eight others, primarily neighbours who had also written to The Post with concerns about the article. Ms Hargreaves’ complaint was about “what was not said in the article”, saying what was presented was “a very biased view of the entire situation”. She says that the journalist has wrongly claimed a number of situations to be fact when they weren’t. She gives two examples of this.
- The first example is about a statement in the article that Mr Page had noticed effluent leaking from a septic tank drainage field and complained to the council about this. What the article did not say was that Mr Page had in fact been responsible for the wilful damage of the system.
- Secondly, Ms Hargreaves refutes Mr Page’s claims that the property was overgrown with scrub and head-height grass when Ms Crosbie purchased it. Ms Hargreaves has aerial photos to prove that this was not the case.
- There are further allegations made in the complaint about Mr Page’s run-ins with neighbours over the years and the impact it has had on them and the wider community.
- Ms Hargreaves’ says that “Mr Page claims he has become a pariah because the valley residents are simply nasty hateful people”.
- Both complainants believe that the article portrays Mr Page in a positive light and that they have been slated as whingers. They believe that there is imbalance in the article because it does not show the true character of Mr Page as experienced by them.
- Ms Hargreaves invited the journalist to meet with the neighbours “to get the other side of the story” but had not received any response to the invitation.
The Response
- The Editor of The Post addresses both complaints in the same response. She says that both of the original communications from the complainants appeared as a news tip and were not seeking any corrections to the reported court judgement. The Editor believes that the complainants, “wanted a platform to air their strong feelings of animosity about a neighbour (Mr Page)” and “their anger that the court had acquitted him on charges they very strongly believed that he was guilty of.”
- Some of the complainants were contacted by the journalist and some were not. The Editor says it is common practice in a busy newsroom that when the same information is being sent in by different readers then they might not all be responded to. She also says that given that the complaints were about the decision to not publish a story about their war with Mr Page then she did not see the applicability of their complaints on fairness, accuracy and balance.
- The Post says that it is their prerogative to make decisions on what stories they publish and that in this case they could not consider the allegations presented by the complainants about Mr Page as many of them were potentially defamatory. More simply the article was a significant and important story of public interest about the dispute between Mr Page and the Regional Council and the decision of the Court of Appeal. Though noting clearly in the story that Mr Page was not a sympathetic character the dispute between neighbours was not newsworthy nor was it relevant to the story being told in the article.
- The Post rejects any principle breaches in this matter.
The Discussion
- The complainants cited Principles (1) Accuracy, Fairness and Balance, (4) Comment and Fact, (5) Columns, Blogs, Opinions and Letters and (12) Corrections. The Council considers that the essence of the complaint is captured by Principle (1). Principles (4) and (5) are more relevant to opinion pieces. This was clearly a news story and opinions expressed were clearly those of people quoted.
- The Post says they did not respond to Ms Hargreaves and Ms O’Brien’s initial communications as they were not easily identifiable as complaints. While Ms O’Brien’s first email was sent to newstips@stuff.co.nz and was not directed to the editor or journalist, Ms Hargreaves’ initial communication was clearly a complaint. She addressed her email to the journalist, raised concerns about inaccuracies and imbalance in the article, matters that are part of the Media Council principles even if Ms Hargreaves did not cite the principles directly. She provided new information about Mr Page that she said would provide context and balance. Where a complaint is clearly focused on a breach of standards, in this case accuracy, balance and fairness, it should be responded to as a formal complaint, but in this case it was not.
- The Post assumed that their communication with one other complainant (not either of the women who brought formal complaints) would have been shared with all the neighbours who were unhappy with the story, but this apparently did not happen. The Council believes that, for the reasons cited, The Post could have done a better job of responding to the complaints.
- In considering the substantive matters raised by the complainants the Media Council agrees that this lengthy article about the Appeal Court’s decision to dismiss charges relating to the destruction of wetlands is an important story of public interest. The implications for councils and landowners are significant. The impact of the proceedings on Mr Page and Ms Crosbie, particularly the imprisonment of Mr Page, is also significant and of public interest.
- The Post says in its formal response that this was a story about a dispute between the council and Mr Page, not about a dispute between Mr Page and his neighbours. The vast majority of the story concerns this significant court case and the effect this had on the couple in their eyes, but the story does stray into the neighbourhood dispute when it says: “The couple said they were vilified by media and the community and abused by neighbours,” and quoted Ms Crosbie as saying they had become local pariahs.
- Although The Post was within its rights to decide not to write a further story about the disputes between the couple and their neighbours, The Post did include elements that were outside the court case when they included the comments about the neighbours, and it would have been fairer to give some of those neighbours a chance to respond. If The Post wanted to avoid a “neighbours at war” story and did not want to go to the neighbours for a response it might have been better to leave those comments out.
- Although it might have been fairer to go to the neighbours for a response to those particular comments, The Post did extensively detail Mr Page's history of challenging behaviour, portraying him as argumentative, stubborn, and unsympathetic, according to his own admissions. The story included the fact that a District Court judge had characterised him as "aggressively defiant of the council and the court." This portrayal suggests that Mr Page is a difficult individual, which in turn undermines the credibility of his comments about his neighbours and provides some context and balance that is not favourable to Mr Page. Readers could draw their own conclusion about the situation and the reliability of Mr Page’s generalised comments about neighbours. The Council also notes that the vast majority of the story is about the significant legal case and the concerning comments about the neighbours are only a very minor part of the article. On this basis, by a slim margin, the Council does not find that the article breached Principle (1) in terms of balance.
- The complainants raise two examples of what they say are factual inaccuracies. The first is that Mr Page describes the problems he noticed with the septic system, but the complainant says he damaged the system himself and the story does not say this. While this may be the case, the article is not inaccurate in describing Mr Page as reporting the damage to the council.
- The second issue is whether or not the property, when first purchased, was overgrown, as Mr Page described it. Because this point, and the matter of the septic system is of only marginal relevance to the main thrust of the story about the overturning of the legal ruling, the Council does not believe they amount to a breach of accuracy as set out in Principle (1).
- In summary, although the Council had some concerns about the response of The Post to the complaints and the failure to ask the neighbours to respond to accusations about the couple having been abused by the neighbours, the Council finds that the complaint did not reach the threshold of a breach of Principle (1). Because there were no significant factual inaccuracies proven, there was no requirement for a correction, so the Principle (12) Corrections complaint is not upheld.
Council members considering the complaint were Hon Raynor Asher (Chair), Hank Schouten, Rosemary Barraclough, Tim Watkin, Scott Inglis, Ben France-Hudson, Judi Jones, Alison Thom and Richard Pamatatau.