Medical Practitioners Board of Victoria & Ors v Mann

(2000) 1 VR 609; [2000] VSCA 89

Victorian Court of Appeal

Built by Barristers,
For Australian Law.

See how it works

Interrogate

Catchwords

1. Defamation
2. › Privilege
3. › Absolute privilege
4. › Quasi-judicial proceedings
5. › Whether preliminary investigation by statutory board attracts absolute privilege
6. › Distinction between preliminary investigation and formal hearing
7. › Medical Practice Act 1994 (Vic), Part 3
1. Defamation
2. › Privilege
3. › Qualified privilege
4. › Scope of privileged occasion
5. › Whether defamatory material irrelevant to and outside scope of privilege
6. › Circumstances in which qualified privilege exhausted by extraneous defamatory material
7. › Whether scope of privilege defined by statutory powers or common law principles
1. Practice and Procedure
2. › Striking out defences
3. › Whether defence of privilege palpably unarguable
4. › Circumstances in which judge entitled to strike out defences of absolute and qualified privilege prior to trial

Quick Take

Communications by statutory regulatory boards following preliminary investigations of complaints are not protected by absolute privilege; only formal hearing proceedings of a quasi-judicial nature attract such protection. The scope of a qualified privilege occasion arising from a statutory body's communications is not defined by the limits of the body's statutory powers but by the common law principles governing the relevance of material to the privileged occasion. Defamatory material in a privileged communication will only fall outside the scope of the privilege if it is so foreign, extraneous, or totally unconnected with the subject matter of the occasion that it cannot reasonably be regarded as germane to it.