Andrew Laming on the ‘awful, awful’ time of upskirting claims

His life and career were ruined by upskirting claims, but Andrew Laming was eventually vindicated. Could he now make a political comeback, asks Des Houghton. VOTE IN OUR POLL

I don’t think I have ever seen journalism at its best or its worst as I have in the past few years.

Former Courier-Mail reporter Hedley Thomas, now chief correspondent at The Australian, showed the power of the press to right wrongs and help heal old wounds by exposing a murderer who had evaded justice for 40 years.

Chris Dawson was found guilty of killing his wife Lynette on compelling circumstantial evidence painstakingly gathered by Thomas for his podcast The Teacher’s Pet.

Journalism at its very worst came with the character assassination of the former member for Bowman and Churchie old boy Andrew Laming, who was falsely accused of “upskirting”, or taking an improper photo of a woman as she knelt to put drink bottles in a fridge.

It just didn’t happen. It took the police less than 20 minutes to clear Laming. The woman wasn’t even wearing a skirt, but too late, the damage was done.

I cannot find a more egregious example in Australian history of a politician’s career being destroyed by fake news.

Laming, an eye surgeon, told me he was felled by “gender hysteria” and “gender panic” during an “awful, awful” period of his life.

I have a report by leading media monitoring firm Isentia for the Australian Government Department of Parliamentary Services that shows a potential 456 million sets of eyes saw inaccurate stories and comments about Laming in a 23-day period in March and April 2021, after Nine News reported the scandal that wasn’t.

Isentia tracked the story and its reaction across all media platforms from television, print, digital and social media.

It said: “An analysis of coverage published measuring volume and potential reach in the last 23 days found … 128,000 mentions.

“The coverage reached a cumulative potential reach of 456, 325,752 and an ASR (advertising spend rate) of $215,333,843.”

The attacks on Laming were vitriolic and came from politicians, journalists, bloggers, academics and even actors.

Protesters led by Labor luminaries Penny Wong and Terri Butler rallied outside Laming’s Cleveland office waving provocative signs.

Across the electronic media, some women’s rights activists who criticised Laming seemed to me to be high on their own self-righteousness.

Nine paid Laming about $1m, reportedly the biggest defamation payment in Australian history.

Nine’s chairman Peter Costello may be surprised to learn Nine could have escaped without paying a cent.

Laming told me he offered to walk away from the fight if Nine took down the offending reports and issued an apology.

Laming’s lawyers, led by Rebekah Giles, Barry Dean and Sue Chrysanthou QC, argued he had suffered substantial hurt, distress and embarrassment.

The path is now clear for Laming to make a political comeback. He is playing his cards close to his chest, but I expect him to make a dramatic return to State Parliament to claim a Labor seat for the LNP in the 2024 state election.

In court, Nine lawyers read an apology: “On March 27, 2021, Nine News Queensland broadcast a report about Dr Laming, who was at the time a member of federal parliament,” it said.

“Serious allegations were made about Dr Laming in that report, and he sued Nine because of it. Nine News has now seen material which indicates that the photograph Dr Laming took was not lewd in nature. “Nine News unreservedly withdraws those allegations about Dr Laming and apologises to him and his family for the hurt and harm caused by the report.”

The extraordinary controversy began innocently enough when Laming went to the bayside landscape supplier, Nuway at Thornlands, on December 18, 2019, to buy some river stones for a heritage property he was restoring. In what appears to me to be an unremarkable act, Laming, took a photograph of a young woman on bended knee putting cans of soft drink in a small bar fridge on the floor. She was “crouching” not bending over, and she was not showing underwear or revealing a G-string, as some reported. Laming’s defence team compiled copies of the pages from Det Sen Sgt Mat Wickson’s notebook where he wrote in his own hand that the woman was wearing work shorts and a work shirt with long socks and work boots.

Lisa Wilkinson was one of the highest-profile journalists to apologise.

Wickson described the shorts as “ruggers”. He said she wore her polo shirt out, over her work shorts. So, any suggestion her underwear was visible was incorrect. The policeman’s notes also confirm that Laming’s picture was a general one of the workplace taken at normal zoom. Anyone who follows politics will be aware that Laming is a social media devotee with almost daily Facebook posts.

More than 20 journalists and Labor politicians have now apologised.

They included Lisa Wilkinson, Kristina Keneally, Derryn Hinch and Murray Watt.

I suspect that Nine’s fake story grabbed the public imagination because a national debate on gender issues was in full swing. I regret to say I thought the tone of some attacks on Laming bordered on the hysterical.

Laming tried to defend himself but didn’t stand a chance. Anthony Albanese called him a creep.

The character assassination of Andrew Laming also blew a big hole in the ABC’s credibility.

Parliament heard taxpayers had to pay the damages after its Four Corners journalist Louise Milligan accused Laming on her private Twitter account of a “grossly offensive” crime, taking “a photo of a woman’s underwear under her skirt without consent”.

Milligan posted multiple tweets which Laming alleged “irrevocably damaged his personal and professional reputation”. ABC managing director David Anderson said at Parliamentary Estimates hearings that ABC paid $79,000 in damages to Laming plus $45,000 for his legal costs.

Laming was especially critical of Nine for dragging out the case.

“It’s taken 18 months. But all this could have been resolved with no cost to the publisher if they had just taken the story down and apologised back in April last year.

“It was obvious to me they took every step to delay, prolong and make this as expensive and painful as possible,” he said.

“It goes back to the gender hysteria of last year when (Prime Minister Scott) Morrison was struggling with Brittany Higgins.”

It came amid a period of turmoil, he said.

“It was such an awful, awful period. It was directly related to Scott Morrison’s abandonment of my situation without any due process or even obtaining an independent assessment of the allegations that would have quickly cleared me.’’

ABC journalist Louise Milligan

Nine didn’t count on Laming’s determination to clear his name when it “brushed off” a concerns notice.

“The tide really has turned on the hysterical Grace Tame kind of language of 2020.”

Laming said he was caught in the “gender panic” of the time where “the media was willing to run all kinds of stories”.

“Any accusation made by a woman against a male was national news,” he said.

The media delivered “instant guilty verdicts”.

Few journalists questioned the accusations that were being hurled around, he said.

He hoped his case, and a similar successful defamation action brought by former NSW deputy premier John Barilaro, had pulled the excesses of journalism back to reality.

“If they rate not going to print the truth, they are going to have to pay,” Laming said.

The case took a major turn when Nine quietly withdrew its “honest opinion and truth defence”.

The Isentia research may explain Nine’s reticence to settle, he said.

“There were a potential 456 million sets of eyeballs who read or viewed the stories.

“The study showed the ad value of banner ads related to those

Laming stories exceeded $215m.

“That was the value of ads run on negative stories about me in the first two weeks alone.

“Why that is important is that it tells you what this is really about. It’s not actually about truth or fiction for these guys, it’s weighing up whether the delayed cost of settling defamation is worth the revenue.

“The revenue was massive. It’s all about money. People need to know just how much money.’’

The ABC’s payout was “somewhat different”.

“Their money doesn’t come from shareholders,” he said.

“They willingly walked the plank. They willingly joined (Louise) Milligan in a hopeless case.

“They walked all the way to court, never settled and could have paid nothing with an apology.

“The ABC didn’t want to expose any of their crown jewel-journalists to the ignominy of having to publicly apologise.

The ABC spent around $200,000 “to protect Milligan from the embarrassment of an apology”.