Dr Kerryn Phelps, AMA President with Richard Glover, ABC Radio 2BL

GLOVER: You won.

PHELPS: I did.

GLOVER: So the defamation case was essentially about The Australian making some allegations about you, what, trying to give a job to your partner?

PHELPS: Yes, it was, but it made allegations that I tried to get a salary for her from the AMA that was way in excess of what the position was worth and that I'd somehow, tried to go about it in secret and it was just so far beyond the pail, I thought, 'I've got to take action on this to clear my name'.

GLOVER: Okay, so what actually happened, in reality?

PHELPS: Well, in reality Jackie Stricker, who's my partner has been my personal assistant, for several years, before I was AMA President. She was going to always continue in that role and be paid out of our joint company, not from the AMA. What the AMA Federal Council had to decide was simply because Jackie would be travelling with me to do her duties, for the AMA, how they were going to go about paying for her airfares to accompany me.

GLOVER: But it was always open and above board?

PHELPS: As these things must be when you're a membership organisation and that, I think, was one of the most, to me, upsetting features of that article, apart from the fact that the newspaper was told the night they went to press that what they were about to publish was completely untrue and they chose to publish it anyway.

GLOVER: You've been very honest and frank about this relationship. We've talked before about the quite lovely picture in the Archibald's of the two of you. Do you sometimes regret your frankness about it?

PHELPS: No, not at all. I think that I'm very aware that we're breaking new ground all the time and sometimes when you're breaking new ground you have to have battles that you shouldn't have to have and this was one of them.

GLOVER: Do you think that they made this allegation in a way that they wouldn't have if your partner was a bloke?

PHELPS: Well, I think the way that Jackie and I work is a new paradigm in itself, so it's hard to say. Certainly, there are a lot of, for example, politicians whose partners, male or female, work in their electorate offices and so from that respect it's not unusual. We've got a lot of friends who are husbands and wives who work together in running their family businesses and so forth, so that's not unusual. I think that for some reason they found this particular relationship something that was worth commenting on in this way.

GLOVER: Okay, but victory is yours. Now, of course, the process by which News Limited puts some evidence and the judge decides the damages.

PHELPS: Yes, that's right. The way the New South Wales defamation laws work, a jury decides whether the imputations or the meanings that you believe were made in the article were in fact the case, and then whether those meanings were defamatory and the jury found in our favour on all of those counts, today.

GLOVER: Doctor Kerryn Phelps, thanks for your time.

PHELPS: Thank you, Richard.

Ends