Breach of statutory duty under Road Management Act 2004
Negligence
Road traffic accident
Quick Take
1Under the Road Management Act 2004 (Vic), where a road authority has complied with the inspection regime and intervention levels set by its road management plan, and the relevant defect was not identified at inspections as exceeding the intervention level, the statutory defences in ss 103 and 105 are available and the authority does not have actual knowledge of the particular risk for the purposes of s 102(2).
2Where a plaintiff in a road accident case has no reliable memory of the accident due to head injury and there is no direct evidence of the mechanism of the crash, causation is not established on the balance of probabilities if the proven facts give rise to conflicting inferences of equal degrees of probability — including speed, evasive action, incorrect cornering line, and road surface defects — and no expert can say any cause consistent with liability is more probable than alternatives inconsistent with liability.
3A Jones v Dunkel inference cannot be used to fill a gap in the evidence; where technical data files were produced to the plaintiff but required proprietary software to access, the failure of the defendant to call evidence about the file contents does not support an inference adverse to the defendant where the plaintiff did not take available steps to access the data.
