60 Minutes (Australian TV program)

60 Minutes has won numerous awards for broadcasting, including five Silver Logies, one Special Achievement Logie, and received nominations for a further six Logie awards. In 2018, 60 Minutes was inducted into the TV Week Logie Hall of Fame.[1]

In March 2016, a news crew for Australia's 60 Minutes working with Jan Sjunnesson came under attack, including having stones thrown on them and a car running over the foot of a cameraman who was trying to prevent it from leaving in the immigrant-dominated district of Rinkeby of Stockholm.[2] 60 Minutes published the video, on which reporter Liz Hayes states "there are now 55 declared no-go zones in Sweden."[3]

In April 2016, Tara Brown and eight other people (including three other staff members of Nine, David Ballment, Stephen Rice, and Ben Williamson)[4] were arrested on allegations of child abduction in Beirut. According to Lebanese authorities, 60 Minutes allegedly paid $115,000 directly to the Child Abduction Recovery International Agency, despite claims that the exchange was made by the mother of the children. The abduction agency used has also been widely discredited, with fake recovery stories being posted on Facebook and their operators having been arrested all over the world. The recovery involved the team waiting in a parked car on the street and then snatching the children from their grandmother and nanny before driving away. "A Lebanese judicial source" told The Guardian that the group were to be charged with "armed abduction, purveying threats and physical harm" – crimes which carry sentences of twenty years' imprisonment with hard labour.[5] The group were released from custody only after Nine paid a substantial money settlement to the father of the children the subject of the abduction attempt. This operation sparked wide debate about the ethics of the journalism being conducted.

In May 2019, a jury ruled that a 60 Minutes story aired in 2015 about the 2011 Grantham floods defamed four members of the Wagner family, from Toowoomba, Queensland, by implying they were responsible for the 12 deaths that occurred during the disaster. In November, a court ordered Channel Nine to pay $2.4 million plus $63,000 in interest to the family. Nick Cater, a journalist featured in the program, was ordered to pay an additional $1.2 million in damages.[6][7] Justice Peter Applegarth, who was in charge of the case, stated that while Cater had information contradicting the program's allegations, he did not include them in the story. Applegarth also concluded that Channel Nine failed to inform the Wagners of the allegations until after the program had been publicised, and when the family did send a statement to Nine, they did not include it in the program.[6]

• List of Australian television series
• Journalism in Australia
• List of longest-running Australian television series

• Australia's 60 Minutes official website
• 60 Minutes at IMDb