Mr. Declan Doyle:

The proposed head 6 seeks to posit factual events in a statute and that just never works. I will return to this in relation to section 26 and the fair and reasonable thing. It is trying to anticipate events and try to provide for situations. The question the Senator has raised is a really good one. He says it is not defamatory for retailers or people acting on their behalf to do the following, but the Senator has asked whether there are circumstances in which what they are asking, in accordance with the Act, could in fact be defamatory. The answer to that is probably yes, but then we are back to a court trying to work it out and considering something like they did not ask for a receipt in accordance with the Act and in effect said the person robbed that. A section like that, like the existing section 26 of the Act, does not work in practical terms because, at the end of the day, a court is left trying to deal with the factual situation as prescribed or as set out in advance by a section of an Act. That just does not work in practice.