The Court struck out portions of the plaintiff's amended statement of claim alleging coercion and quasi-criminal conduct by a superannuation fund trustee, holding that allegations of fraud, collusion and intimidation must identify with specificity the natural persons involved, the acts relied upon, and how any implied threats arose from the pleaded facts — general references to 'agents' and 'all conduct' were impermissibly vague. The Court also struck out large portions of the CFMEU's defence where an obfuscating pleading structure (asserting joint employment with a federal union entity without clearly stating whether acts were denied as not occurring or denied as not attributable to the defendant) infected subsequent general denials, rendering them ambiguous as to the basis of each denial. The Court declined to strike out defence paragraphs that adequately joined issue or where the defendant could only plead what it knew, and rejected the plaintiff's argument that a defendant must state the factual basis for a denial.
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