A court has ordered Nine Network Australia and journalist
Nicholas Cater to pay four members of a Toowoomba family a total of
more than $3 million for falsely reporting that they were
responsible for floods that led to the destruction of a town and
the deaths of 12 people.
Justice Peter Applegarth of the Supreme Court of Queensland
delivered an 86-page
judgment on 22 November 2019, in which he categorised a report
broadcast on Channel Nine's 60 Minutes program on 24 May 2015
as "extremely serious defamation", describing the
program's imputations as "false" and the reporting as
"unjustifiable" and "improper".
The report, titled 'The Missing Hour', inferred that the
Wagner family caused the collapse of a wall in the Lockyer Valley
quarry that they owned, which led to extensive damage of the region
and the deaths of 12 people.
