Sarina & Anor v O'Shannassy

In the Federal Circuit Court of Australia, Judge Manousaridis considered a dispute between two applicants and a respondent. The applicants alleged contraventions of sections 18(1), 20, and 50 of the Australian Consumer Law (ACL), as well as causes of action in defamation. The Court's jurisdiction in relation to ACL matters was limited to claims not exceeding $750,000 for loss or damage. The applicants conceded that their ACL claims had no reasonable prospects of success because the ACL, as a Commonwealth law, only applies to the conduct of corporations, and the respondent was not a corporation.

The central legal issues before the Court were whether, notwithstanding the concession regarding the ACL claims, it possessed jurisdiction to determine the defamation causes of action. This involved considering whether the defamation causes of action and the ACL contraventions arose from a common substratum of facts, thereby forming a single controversy over which the Court could exercise jurisdiction. Additionally, the Court had to determine whether the applicants should be estopped from pursuing their claims due to their failure to raise them in earlier proceedings in the Local Court of New South Wales.

The Court reasoned that it had jurisdiction to determine the defamation causes of action. It found that the defamation claims and the ACL claims did indeed arise from a common substratum of facts, constituting a single controversy. The Court also determined that it was not unreasonable for the applicants to have omitted raising these claims in the earlier Local Court proceedings, thus rejecting the estoppel argument. Furthermore, the Court considered an application for leave to file an amended statement of claim in defamation. It found that all but one of the imputations pleaded were reasonably capable of arising from the material in question and that one proposed imputation was not capable of bearing a defamatory meaning.

Consequently, the Court granted leave to file the amended statement of claim, subject to the omission of the imputation that was not capable of bearing a defamatory meaning.