Sunday, 5th March, 2006

The editor of The West Australian, Paul Armstrong, is clearly not in a mood for mitigating any damages that result from his paper's extraordinary attack on the Police and Justice Minister John D'Orazio. On the contrary, Mr Armstrong seems determined to make the defamation greater and to bring the Corruption and Crime Commission into his imaginary conspiracy.

At a public hearing on Friday the CCC Commissioner Kevin Hammond reported on a formal assessment of allegations raised in The West Australian. Mr Hammond said the allegations had been assessed and no further action would be taken.

A reasonable person might have thought this finding would result in some kind of apology from the newspaper which had labelled the Police Minister as a "Godfather" but far from it. When reporting a comment by the Premier Alan Carpenter that Mr D'Orazio had been cleared by the CCC, The West Australian inserted the word claimed Mr D'Orazio had been cleared. The Premier said: ""I've been asked several times over the week or so: Will you sack your Minister? Well, rhetorically I'll ask the management of The West Australian: What are you going to do now?"

There was no word from the management reported on Saturday but editor Paul Armstrong said he stood by everything the paper had published on the matter. "Everything The West Australian has published in this respect is factual and nothing it has reported has been contradicted by today's findings of the CCC. The West Australian will not be apologising to Mr D'Orazio because it has nothing to apologise for," Armstrong said.

The Armstrong approach is perhaps best illustrated by the treatment of the word "Godfather" which it used in its original headline because, in the words of Amanda Banks in The Australian, "flamboyant lawyer Patti Chong" had referred to a Godfather figure who organised a meeting between former Stirling mayor Adam Spagnolo and carpet business owner Tony Drago. Commissioner Hammond on Friday described the "Gopdfather" reference as a throw away line that was not intended to have any further meaning or significance. That finding of insifnificance was not mentioned in The West Australian website report

Rather the paper pretended that the CCC had "sat on key D'Orazio evidence" - evidence that was never key and only needed to become evidence at all because of the defamatory initial report in The West Australian.

Mr D'Orazio is now seeking advice about the legal implications of allegations made by the newspaper.

First call him a Godfather

Then pretend there's an inquiry

Then attack the judge who found nothing wrong