Volunteered defamatory statements made at a public fundraising meeting to approximately 100 unidentified persons do not attract common law qualified privilege where the statements (calling the plaintiff a 'thug' and 'bully') are unconnected to the subject matter of the meeting (raising funds for a third party's legal defence) and the speaker has no pressing need to protect his own or the third party's interests by making those statements. The public interest requirement for qualified privilege operates at the level of the type of communication, not the particular defamatory utterance. Assertions that a person 'is' a thug and bully, stated as the speaker's direct characterisation and asserted to have been 'proven in a court of law', are statements of fact rather than comment.
The full text is available to signed-in members, including the 32 later cases that cite this judgment.
5 of the 32 citing cases carry a classified treatment. How each court treated it is available to signed-in members.