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Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

In the event that this release was illegal, I really do feel for the people at the agency. Someone made public false allegations about them and they are legally forbidden from proving that person wrong. It's a tough position to be in.

I don't have a good solution to this, but I do think that there should be a legal way to prove a person is lying if they directly make accusations about you. After all, they are the one who made the situation public, not you.

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Centrelink has all sorts of horrible things said about it, and recently in particular they've been doing some pretty unethical things around debt collection. But the thing is that they're a government department full of civil servants. It's their role to implement policy, not to defend government actions - that's for politicians to do. It's not a tough position at all; the correct response is "We don't comment on private matters", and you hear large entities say it every day.

Imagine if the IRS released Trump's tax returns. Trump has been lying about them being held up by the IRS (all those years? seriously? can't release some old ones?), but the IRS refuse to be 'fair about it' because it's a matter of privacy. Even though they're being maligned and it's clearly in the public interest. This Centrelink issue is the exact same thing, except for the clear public interest.

Besides, Centrelink doesn't need a reputation, since they're not selling anything. People go there out of need, not desire.

Is there something wrong with the agency making a public statement refuting the allegations, citing the information they have (but without specifics for privacy reasons)? Surely that helps them without their having handed over information?

"She's wrong but we can't release any evidence proving it" doesn't seem very effective.

I'd say they have writers capable of doing a little better than that.

Virtually every PR statement omits detail and evidence that would back up their statements.

> there should be a legal way to prove a person is lying if they directly make accusations about you.

"about you"? Her article did not name or provide identifying information about any individual employee of Centrelink.

In my post, "you" refers to the corporate person that is the Centrelink government agency (and implicitly the humans behind that corporate person), about which false allegations were made.

Is there some meaningful distinction here that means false allegations about an organization of humans should go unrefuted, but false allegations about a single human should be refuted?

> Is there some meaningful distinction here that means false allegations about an organization of humans should go unrefuted, but false allegations about a single human should be refuted?

To me, false allegations against individuals are more serious than false allegations against organizations for a few reasons. First, I care about the well-being of organizations only to the extent they positively impact the well-being of humans (or, to a lesser extent, animals). Second, a single false allegation against an individual human seems to be able to have a much more damaging effect than one against an organization.

I suspect this is a well-worn topic and that I would consider many of the other objections to corporate personhood to be "meaningful distinctions".

In this case, the false allegations were spread with the implicit goal of getting the government to spend more money/resources fixing problems that may not exist. If successful, that would result in a huge amount of waste, which harms real humans.

Even if it were a private organization, such allegations could directly result in harm to the human owners. For example, false allegations about bad food at a restaurant would mean the human owners and employees lose money. In much the same way, false allegations about a human might result in them losing their job.

While all of these are possible and all of these are bad outcomes, I think that their probability of happening and the magnitude of the result is less bad than what would occur if allegations of cruelty or incompetence were made against an individual.

I don't think we're going to be able to settle this argument here, so I'll just leave it at that.

Doesn't Australian defamation law only apply to organisations below a certain size? (15 employees or FTE - something like that.)

Fewer than 10 employees and not related to any other corporation.

The relevant section: http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/nsw/consol_act/da200599/s... (This is the New South Wales legislation but it's almost perfectly uniform in all states and territories.)

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