Where a civil finding necessarily involves a conclusion that a party engaged in serious criminal conduct and gave perjured evidence, the Briginshaw standard requires that the circumstantial evidence clearly favour the inference of guilt over competing innocent hypotheses. Where competing inferences are of equal probability, neither can be adopted and the party bearing the onus fails. An appellate court is in as good a position as the trial judge to assess witness credibility where the trial judge's rejection of evidence was based on the content of answers rather than demeanour.
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