The Australian Quarterly invited David Ritter, CEO, Greenpeace Australia Pacific, to write about the growing use of lawfare by vested corporate interests for their July 2025 edition. The article is republished here with permission.

Like so many revolutions, the transformation of Australia’s worst domestic climate polluter to a case study of ambitious emissions reduction began with posters that mocked the status quo for all to see.

Appearing first online in May 2021 and then, more traditionally, pasted up in prominent real life locations around Sydney and Melbourne, the placards were clear in their satirical intent. Featuring dreadful images of the grievous impacts of climate change, the logo of energy company AGL was accompanied by the tagline “Australia’s Greatest Climate Liability”. Greenpeace’s signature logo on the bottom of the posters left no doubt as to who was responsible for the production and distribution. 

Nor was there any doubt that a new website (australiasgreatestliability.com), which bore AGL’s logo and signature colours along with a report outlining AGL’s polluting activities, was parody. 

But the plainness of the intent didn’t stop AGL from threatening to sue Greenpeace for infringing its intellectual property rights. Our position was that Greenpeace was acting in a principled way, and well within our legal rights, so we declined AGL’s demand to remove the company’s branding from our campaign materials.

Shortly afterwards, AGL—a multibillion-dollar company—initiated legal proceedings against Greenpeace in the Federal Court of Australia. Our view was that AGL’s actions constituted a SLAPP—a Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation—that was intended to shut down Greenpeace’s campaign, sending a wider message to communities and activists that democratic dissent would not be tolerated.  

It was clear that the outcome of the litigation would go far beyond the AGL campaign. As a number of other leading environmental charities said in an open letter to AGL at the time  the case was ‘a direct affront to free speech and the ability of organisations to hold corporations to account on climate change’. AGL remained unmoved, and matters were put to the test in the courts. 

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The term ‘SLAPP’ was first introduced by American academics George William Pring and  Penelope Canan in the 1990s. Pring and Canan defined SLAPPs as lawsuits that met the primary criteria of involving communications made to influence decision makers, and three secondary criteria: 

• resulted in a civil complaint or counterclaim
• was filed against non-government individuals or organisations 
• concerned a substantive issue of some public interest or social significance 

Pring and Canan went on to map the three stages of a SLAPP: citizens communicating their concern about an issue to a decision-maker, the proponents of said issue filing a suit against opponents of their plans, targeting their political activity, and the disposition of the case itself. 

Typically, a SLAPP suit will involve aggressive and abusive conduct by the litigating party. This form of activity might include bringing multiple simultaneous or sequential proceedings, including in different jurisdictions, as well as drawing processes out as long as possible through the pre-trial process, including engaging in numerous rounds of amendments to pleadings, disproportionate discovery requests, extensive adjournments and other delays and engaging in gratuitous arguments over minor interlocutory matters. The party being sued is also a giveaway—is the recipient of the suit a particularly vulnerable or outspoken individual, or is it an organisation that is being targeted for some strategic reason?

From circulating flyers to undertaking peaceful protest, authoring reports or engaging in parody, the most basic acts of democratic expression and civic participation can draw a SLAPP from vested interests. There may be an arguable cause of action at stake in SLAPP suits, but the defining intention of a SLAPP is not to right a wrong, but rather, to silence and intimidate: draining away the time, money, resources and will of the target in question, until the community, organisation or individual in question feels that that they have no choice but to stop resisting. SLAPP suits are, in essence, a form of juridical bullying. 

The motivation behind a SLAPP may be anti-democratic (simply, to use the courts to suppress dissent), or to defend the business model of a vested interest by resisting the kind of campaigning scrutiny that brings some element of corporate operations into question. Many businesses would regard the pursuit of SLAPP suits as unethical, ill-advised or just too risky, but for others, the temptation to use litigation to silence legitimate criticism or peaceful protest has proven irresistible. 

Greenpeace’s global network has has seen lawsuits from Esso in France (over the use of their logo on a parody website–the French court upheld Greenpeace’s right to the freedom of expression); from Canadian logging company Resolute Forest Products in 2016 (Resolute’s claims were dismissed not once, but twice), and a multimillion-dollar intimidation lawsuit brought by Shell against Greenpeace UK and Greenpeace International over a peaceful protest, which was ultimately settled out of court without any payment being made to the company.

Most recently, Energy Transfer—a US-based fossil fuel company that is responsible for the Dakota Access Pipeline—brought a baseless lawsuit against Greenpeace entities in the US and Greenpeace International related to the Indigenous-led 2016 protests at Standing Rock. When the company’s first attempt at a lawsuit under the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) was immediately dismissed by a federal judge, Energy Transfer tried again in a North Dakota state court.

Conducted in a courtroom in the famously pro-fossil fuel state, the case involved Energy Transfer—a company with a market capitalisation of US$61 billion—suing Greenpeace for nearly US$300 million in damages. It was evident from the get-go that this case was never about any real damages, but rather a baseless attempt to destroy Greenpeace in the US with an impossibly large claim—and warn off any other civil society organisations seeking to challenge the interests of polluting corporations. 

In March, a nine-person jury found Greenpeace entities liable for more than US$660 million—a verdict that has been widely slammed by legal observers, free speech advocates and civil society leaders as an unfair attack by Big Oil on lawful opposition. Among the independent trial monitors who observed the case, prominent US attorney Marty Garbus, a man who has practiced law for six decades and represented globally iconic clients including Nelson Mandela, Cesar Chavez, and Vaclav Havel, said that:

In my six decades of legal practice, I have never witnessed a trial as unfair as the one against Greenpeace that just ended in the courts of North Dakota. This is one of the most important cases in American history. The law that can come down in this case can affect any demonstration, religious or political. It’s far bigger than the environmental movement. Yet the court in North Dakota abdicated its sacred duty to conduct a fair and public trial and instead let Energy Transfer run roughshod over the rule of law. 

Greenpeace unequivocally disagrees with the verdict and refuses to be silenced. Greenpeace US entities will appeal the case, and the matter remains ongoing. Globally, the Greenpeace network is rallying to respond to this attack.

* * * 

Corporations with business models built on destroying our planet for profit have resorted to similarly ugly tactics here in Australia. According to the Human Rights Law Centre (HRLC), the ‘legal bullying of ordinary Australians as well as community groups by big corporations with ‘attack-dog’ law firms, is on the rise’. As far back as 2004, Australia’s then-largest wood-chipping export company Gunns filed a lawsuit against 20 environmental activists, including Bob Brown, seeking $6.3 million in damages over ongoing campaign activities against its logging operations. As the HRLC explains in its ‘Stop the SLAPP’ report, the lawsuit was initiated just two days before Gunns referred its controversial pulp mill to the Federal Government for assessment, leading many to view the legal action as a strategic effort to silence criticism. The outrage at the heavy-handedness of the lawsuit sparked a campaign targeting Gunns’ financiers, shareholders and customers, and ultimately damaged the company’s reputation and market value. After a complex and painful—for Gunns—process, Gunns ultimately dropped the case entirely in 2010 and paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to the defendants before being placed into liquidation in March 2013. 

More recently, after winning a legal case in which the Environmental Defenders Office had represented three Tiwi Island traditional owners—Simon Munkara, Carol Puruntatameri and Maria Tipuamantumirri—who had claimed that the Barossa Gas Export Pipeline would impact sacred sites and disturb cultural songlines, petrochemical company Santos was not only successful in securing a $9 million dollar costs order against the solicitors for the plaintiffs, but then applied to the court for subpoenas seeking a wide range of documents from four other environmental charities that had not been party to the litigation. As observer Geoffrey Watson SC noted, the potential for costs orders being pursued against supportive third parties could have ‘the most terrible chilling effect’ on public interest litigants who would not be able to proceed without such support.

SLAPPs are an affront to the fundamental purpose of the justice system, and to the ideal of equality before the law. The legal system should be a vehicle for accountability, not an instrument that can be weaponised by the powerful to evade scrutiny or systematically bully critics into silence. As the climate and biodiversity crises accelerate, and this critical decade for action to prevent irreversible damage to the systems that are the very foundation of life on earth ticks on, it is particularly perverse and odious if polluting corporations are able to use the legal system to maintain the malign power of their vested interests.

In late 2024, a coalition of 85 organisations called on the Albanese government to protect community voices by introducing national anti-SLAPP laws. As the HRLC has outlined:

To truly be effective, a robust, nationally consistent approach to anti-SLAPP legislation is essential. Without such protections, SLAPPs will continue to be used to silence advocacy and activism, erode accountability, and undermine democracy.

Effective federal anti-SLAPP laws would need to protect Australians’ rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly, the right to public participation, and the rights of human rights defenders. Ranging from a broad and robust definition of “public interest” activities that are protected from SLAPPs to shifting the burden of proof to plaintiffs, expedited hearings to avoid unnecessary costs for defendants and ensuring defendants have the right to an immediate appeal if the motion to dismiss is denied—among others. Anti-SLAPP legal frameworks already exist in multiple jurisdictions around the world, including in Europe and North America, but in Australia, have so far only been introduced in the ACT.

The May federal election was a decisive rejection of the bullying Trumpist approach to politics. On 10 June, in his first National Press Club speech since the election, the Prime Minister said that Australians had ‘voted against importing conflicts and ideologies that have no basis in our national culture or character’ and had ‘rejected policies copied from overseas that would only leave us a smaller, narrower, less generous and more divided country’. The introduction of national anti-SLAPP legislation would be a way of contributing to the preservation and nurturing of the richly pluralistic and rambunctious democratic tradition that has contributed to so much that is best about Australia and intrinsic to the brightest elements of our national character, as well as protecting us against the importation of US-style weaponisation of our legal system.

* * *

Greenpeace Australia Pacific’s refusal to bow down to AGL’s legal demands had a happy ending. Not only did the Federal Court overwhelmingly find in Greenpeace’s favour—in proceedings that generated hundreds of top-tier news articles that highlighted AGL as Australia’s worst domestic climate polluter—but in our view, important principles were upheld. As our in-house general counsel Katrina Bullock said to the media, the legal victory was ‘good news for charities, advocacy organisations, satirists and anyone else who seeks to rely on the ‘fair dealing’ freedom of speech safeguard in the Copyright Act to criticise, review, satirise or parody powerful corporations’. 

The campaign itself also ended with a highly satisfactory outcome, when after sustained and multi-pronged pressure, AGL abruptly changed business strategy. After a change in company leadership, in September 2022, AGL announced that it was bringing forward the last of its coal-burning power stations to 2035 and a commitment to replace coal with $12 billion worth of new renewable energy. A few months later, new independent directors on AGL’s board indicated interest in further accelerating AGL’s coal closure timelines. The company has recently begun the installation of its first grid-scale battery at the site of the former coal-burning Liddell Power Station.

It is in the clear interests of Australia’s democracy, society and environment for the federal government to enact national anti-SLAPP legislation. Yet while the lacunae continue to remain open, businesses should also think very carefully before going down the path of the SLAPP. As the AGL case shows, the interests of the corporation and its shareholders were ultimately not well served by trying to suppress the legitimate protest activity that was subjecting the business to scrutiny, but rather by embracing the imperative for a profound shift in strategy. 

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