WA premier Mark McGowan’s text messages between Kerry Stokes and the WA Attorney General have been revealed at the trial in Clive Palmer’s defamation case, including an exchange in which the state’s leader thanks the media baron for the “marvellous front pages”.
An appeal by billionaire Clive Palmer and his mining company Mineralogy has succeeded in reinstating parts of their defence attacking the state of mind of Hong Kong-based conglomerate CITIC in allegedly applying commercial pressure over the $5.8 billion Sino Iron project in Western Australia.
Taking the stand Monday in a defamation dispute with mining billionaire Clive Palmer, WA premier Mark McGowan said Palmer’s “hurtful and outrageous” public comments led to death threats against his wife and family.
The WA Supreme Court has thrown out challenges to Woodside Energy’s proposals to expand its Scarborough LNG project, finding there were no errors in the state EPA’s approval.
Comments made about Clive Palmer by Western Australia premier Mark McGowan in press conferences were “heavy with historical and sinister significance”, a court has heard on the first day of trial in the mining billionaire’s defamation case.
Australia’s most decorated Afghanistan war veteran Ben Roberts-Smith told a former SAS soldier that when he “blew the brains out” of a young Afghan man it was “the most beautiful thing [he’d] ever seen”, a court has heard.
A SAS sergeant testifying for Fairfax Media in the Ben Roberts-Smith’s defamation trial has admitted he told an investigative reporter the decorated veteran machine-gunned a disabled man during the war in Afghanistan, but insisted everything he said was true.
Fairfax has accused senior counsel representing Ben Roberts-Smith of using cross-examination to try to identify the source of allegedly defamatory articles that accused the former SAS soldier of war crimes.
A judge who has been an enthusiastic lab rat in the virtual hearing experiment forced on the country’s courts by the COVID-19 pandemic has expressed doubts that he is accurately reading witnessses giving remote evidence.
An appeals court has unanimously rejected the Commissioner of Taxation’s latest bid to block Shell’s $2.3 billion tax deduction for the cost of exploration activities conducted as part of the Browse LNG project off the coast of Western Australia.