A former Labor MP has sensationally claimed he is being “silenced” by “council mayors” after being ordered to pay thousands of damages for comparing the head of a major local government lobby group to Jabba the Hutt over a series of Facebook posts. Rob Pyne, a former Queensland MP turned local councillor for Cairns, and North Queensland woman Lyn Kennedy (formerly O’Connor) were slugged with the brutal damages after being sued by Greg Hallam, the former chief executive of the Local Government Association of Queensland (LGAQ) back in 2017. The District Court battle came to an end in October – two years after Judge Dean Morzone reserved his decision.
Mr Hallam has been awarded more than $500,000 in damages, with Ms Kennedy and Mr Pyne ordered to pay him $346,131 and $157,261 respectively. But Mr Pyne has slammed the decision as being about “council mayors silencing dissent” through the lobby group. He said he otherwise had “no problem” with the judge who was “understanding and applied the law at the time before the defamation law reforms”.
Mr Pyne represented the seat of Cairns in Queensland’s legislative assembly from 2015 to 2017, resigning from the Labor Party in 2016 to sit as an independent. During his time in parliament, he had been frequently critical of Mr Hallam in his role as the head of the LGAQ, using parliamentary privilege to advance unproven allegations of corruption in local government. At the time, Mr Pyne was representing the seat of .