To call it long-overdue is an understatement. On Thursday the NSW government tabled a review of the country’s uniform defamation laws in State Parliament, more than six years after it was due to be released.

The review, statutorily required to be carried out in NSW ‘‘as soon as possible’’ after the fifth anniversary of the Defamation Act in January 2011 and a report tabled within a year, is expected to prompt a national debate about overhauling the laws to keep pace with technological changes.

There is much work to be done.  The last comprehensive national review of defamation laws was in 1979, almost 30 years before Facebook was launched in 2004 and the first tweet was sent in 2006.
NSW is the natural leader of the reform process for a number of reasons, including that the uniform laws – which exhibit some small local differences – were modelled on the state’s 1974 Defamation Act.

Attorney-General Mark Speakman is not to blame for his predecessors’ delay in releasing the report and has shown an admirable willingness to kick off the national reform process after years of inertia. He pointed to a ‘‘huge rise’’ in defamation cases involving social media sites and said the law needed to be ‘‘more tech-savvy’’.

A five-year review of Australian defamation cases covering 2013-17, released in March by the Centre for Media Transition at the University of Technology, Sydney, found 51.3 per cent of the 189 cases involved digital publications such as tweets, emails, Facebook posts and news websites.