Dalas v White; White v Dalas [2025] VCC 1410

Dalas v White; White v Dalas [2025] VCC 1410 | Case summary | Zoe

[5]

During the trial, various witnesses gave evidence about other people who were not called to give evidence. Many of those other people had interacted with the guardianship or trustee systems in different states. During the trial, allegations were made about the conduct of some of those other people. I have applied a pseudonym to those people who were named but who were not witnesses. There is no public interest in those persons being identified.
In 2017, Ms Dalas, an accountant by training, founded a group called Australian Association to Stop Guardianship & Administration Abuse ("AASGAA"). She had an interest in guardianship and administration matters through personal experience involving a family member.
AASGAA provided support and advocacy to people who found themselves involved in guardianship and administration issues.
Ms Dalas said that the primary focus of AASGAA was to raise awareness of guardianship and administration abuses, and to do this by establishing rapport with the media. She said she was not against the guardianship system but was an advocate for reform, particularly around the way hearings in guardianship matters were run. In her view, providing support to families and carers should be a first resort, rather than a last resort.
Her advocacy work included helping people fill out forms, accompanying people to tribunal hearings and providing step by step guidance through the guardianship process.
AASGAA is based in Victoria and, through its Facebook page, quickly became a prominent advocacy group, with around 2,500 members. Ms Dalas said the purpose of the Facebook group was to connect "victims" Australia-wide to share stories, network and connect with journalists who had an interest in the issues.
In particular, from about 2019, she and other AASGAA members engaged with executives from the Four Corners program on ABC TV, with a view to participating in a program about guardianship and administration matters.
In July 2019, AASGAA held a conference in Queensland ("the Queensland conference").
Mr White, a retired manager and investor, also had an interest in guardianship and administration issues. He had assisted a friend, "M", in a legal proceeding related to guardianship. In May 2017, he set up a personal Facebook page related to these issues. He attended the Queensland conference and met Ms Dalas in person for the first time.
At the Queensland conference, Mr White also met another woman, "CC", and offered her financial assistance to find her daughter, who was under a guardianship order and whose whereabouts were unknown to CC.
In August 2019, Mr White set up a public advocacy and support group and a Facebook page called "NSW Trustee & Guardian Client Abuse" ("the NSW Facebook page"). Unlike AASGAA, which did not offer any financial support, Mr White said he provided financial assistance to people in a variety of ways. This included financing legal claims through the courts, and providing funds to locate family members.
Although initially both Ms Dalas and Mr White appear to have had similar aims, within a few months they had had a falling out.
The precise details of that falling out are not relevant, save that Mr White disclosed to Ms Dalas over a number of texts and emails[1] his concerns that people were making false allegations against him. In particular, he told Ms Dalas CC had falsely accused him of "making moves" on her.
In September 2019, Ms Dalas had a conversation with CC, who made a number of allegations about Mr White's conduct towards her, including that he had "put the hard word on (her)" and she had rejected his advances.
On 29 September 2019, Mr White attended an AASGAA conference in Paramatta. At that conference, Mr White told delegates that CC and another woman, "DA", had made allegations about him.
In November 2019, Mr White and Ms Dalas spoke on the telephone. During that call, Mr White told Ms Dalas that another woman, "JM", had accused him of making advances on her.[2]
Mr White denied all these allegations.
Ms Dalas said, after hearing of additional allegations, she formed the view that she did not want to personally interact with Mr White any longer. She removed Mr White from her phone contact list.
In mid-December 2019, Mr White emailed another member of AASGAA, to say that his Facebook page was "suffering from trolling" and that he had been told by one of the people responsible for the trolling that "Christine Dallas [sic] told her to do it".[3]
This allegation came to Ms Dalas' attention. Ms Dalas contacted Mr White to say the allegation was false and defamatory, and that her primary and only concern was AASGAA. She told Mr White that it was best he deal directly with another member of AASGAA going forward.
By this point, Ms Dalas had decided she no longer wanted to have anything more to do with Mr White.
In 2019, Therese Zuanetti's mother was placed under a guardianship order. Her mother subsequently died, and there was resultant publicity in the Queensland media. Ms Zuanetti went onto YouTube to seek assistance.
On 17 December 2019, Mr White contacted Ms Zuanetti and offered her financial assistance to litigate in relation to her mother's death. Ms Zuanetti spoke with Mr White a few times on the phone but declined the offer of financial assistance.
In August 2020, Ms Zuanetti was contacted by a woman, "RP", who suggested she meet with Mr White. Ms Zuanetti said the purpose of the meeting was to start a website. Mr White said the purpose of the meeting was to discuss Ms Zuanetti running community hall meetings, for which he had offered to pay to hire small halls and amplifier systems.
On 29 August 2020, Mr White met with Ms Zuanetti, RP, and another person at a coffee shop in Southport, Queensland. RP and the other person left the coffee shop before the meeting concluded. At the end of the meeting, Ms Zuanetti walked to a nearby supermarket. Mr White walked in the same direction.
On 13 September 2020, Ms Dalas removed and blocked Mr White, along with about 28 others,[4] from the AASGAA Facebook group.
On 15 September 2020, Ms Dalas posted on the AASGAA Facebook page that "In the last few days we have had to block a series of trolls personally attacking various AASGAA advocates". In that post she said no AASGAA members deserved public trolling or bullying, nor to be sent threatening messages. She said that the core group of AASGAA had never met one of the people blocked. She said though opinions will vary about how to deal with guardianship issues, advocates were "all on the same journey. It[']s not a competition. But threats, private stalking and/or troublemakers will not be tolerated! We block for a very good reason."
On 21 September 2020, Mr White posted on his NSW Facebook page:

[24]

The legislation required the Court to extend the time for defamation proceedings where it was not reasonable in the circumstances for the plaintiff to have commenced the action within time, but not otherwise.
The first White publication predated amendments to the legislation, which established that publication occurs at the time the matter complained of is first downloaded and read. Prior to this amendment, publication occurred on each occasion the matter complained of was downloaded and read by a new person.
The first White publication was posted by Ms Dalas as a comment to the Therese Therese post, on the AASGAA Facebook page.
Mr White had been blocked from the AASGAA Facebook page on 13 September 2020.
The public Facebook page is no longer in operation. A screenshot of the Therese Therese post, the first White publication, and the other comments on the post, were annexed to the White Further Amended Statement of Claim. The comments are not dated, but are located in time by reference to the (unknown) date of the screenshot. Each of the comments was posted 48 or 49 weeks before the screenshot, within one or two weeks of the post itself. Extrapolating from this, the visible comments were posted within the period 9 November 2020 to 22 November 2020. After the last comment, there are the words "commenting has been turned off for this post".
Mr White gave evidence that he became aware of the first White publication in July 2021. Mr White said that, upon becoming aware of the first White publication, he immediately took it to his solicitor. He had already consulted his solicitor in June 2021, when he became aware of the second publication he sues on, a publication by Ms Dalas on 23 May 2021, on the AASGAA Facebook page. Mr White said he was advised by his (then) solicitor to seek specialist advice from a solicitor experienced in defamation.
He consulted solicitor, Christopher Hannay of Hannay Lawyers, in about July 2021.
I accept Mr White's evidence about the timing of his becoming aware of the first White publication because:

[26]

If Mr White can establish that the first White publication was read, for the first time, by someone after 10 December 2020, then, in accordance with the law as it was at that time, he is not out of time.
There was no direct evidence that the first White publication was downloaded and read after 10 December 2020. Mr White says this is because Ms Dalas did not raise the limitation period until 9 November 2024. By that time, his witnesses could not recall when they had first seen the first White publication.
Mr White called two lay witnesses. Effie Benatos-Rogers gave no evidence of having seen the first or second White publications. She was aware, in general terms, that Mr White was suing Ms Dalas. She described herself as "very disappointed" and said that God would bring out the truth and those prone to deception would be exposed. She said she had never seen Ms Dalas' comments about Mr White.
Gloria Holland gave evidence that she did not have anything to do with the AASGAA group, has never had anything to do with them and does not know anything about AASGAA. She was not asked whether she had seen the first or second White publication. I can infer that she had not, given her evidence that she had nothing to do with AASGAA, and her evidence that she did not know "fully" what Ms Dalas had said about Mr White. She said she thought Ms Dalas had said something about being in fear for her life, and that Mr White was stalking and harassing her. She commented on a post by Mr White on the NSW Facebook page. Mr White's post dealt extensively with the allegations he claimed Ms Dalas had made about him in the second White publication.
Neither of these witnesses had seen the first White publication after 10 December 2020, or at any time.
Mr White concedes that the inferential evidence that the first White publication was published to one or more persons in Queensland between 10 December 2020 and 10 December 2021 is "slight", but says the Court should draw an inference that the matter was published, in that period, to the person who provided Mr White with a copy of the screenshot in or around July 2021.
I do not accept that such an inference is open on the evidence.
The first White publication was published as a comment on a post on the AASGAA Facebook page. The nature of the AASGAA Facebook page, and Facebook pages more generally, is that posts move down the page as new material is posted. Unless a viewer deliberately scrolls down into the "back catalogue" of posts, or undertakes a search for a particular post, or unless a post is "pinned" so as to ensure it stays at the top of the landing page, an individual post will move off the landing page, as further material is posted. During 2020 and 2021, there were regular posts to the AASGAA Facebook page, which means the first White publication moved off the landing page relatively rapidly. It was not "pinned".
The Therese Therese post itself was commented on 21 times, but there were no comments after, at the latest, 22 November 2020. The likelihood that a post would be read once it moved from the landing page, diminishes significantly. The likelihood that a comment on a post will be read is already lower than the likelihood that the post will be read, and diminishes further with the passage of time. If a week is a long time in politics, a month is an eternity on a busy Facebook page.
The more likely inference available from the fact that the first White publication was provided to Mr White in July 2021, some eight or nine months after it was uploaded, is that the person who provided it to Mr White had seen it at or around the time it was uploaded and, because of that, was able to locate it and provide it to Mr White at a later time.
I am not satisfied that there is an inference available that the first White publication was published, in the relevant sense, on a date between 10 December 2020 and 10 December 2021.
Accordingly, Mr White is out of time in relation to the first White publication.

[30]

Aon Risk Services Australia Ltd v Australian National University[10] established that late amendment to pleadings which would result in delay of the proceedings, could cause prejudice that was not curable by an order for costs. An application for leave to amend a pleading should not be approached on the basis that a party is entitled to raise an arguable claim and that any harm caused by the amendment can be compensated by an appropriate costs order. The rules of court procedure recognise that delay and costs are undesirable and that delay has a deleterious effect, not only on the parties, but to other litigants. In some cases, delay causes prejudice that cannot be remediated and an amendment should not be allowed.
In this case, the amendment would not cause delay; however, it was submitted that allowing the amendment would cause Mr White prejudice, because he had lost an opportunity to prove publication of the matter after 10 December 2020.
Comments on the post were turned off at some point prior to October 2021, when the screenshot was taken; however, there were no comments after 22 November 2020. Raising the defence earlier would not have assisted Mr White in identifying whether anyone had read the post after 10 December 2020, because there were no comments after that time.
Mr White gave evidence that he discussed the first White publication with another person, known as "JS". JS had also been blocked from the AASGAA Facebook page around the same time as Mr White, but Mr White said JS accessed the Facebook page through a friend's computer and read the first publication in or about July 2021. Mr White could have called JS to give evidence of publication after 10 December 2020. The fact that he did not call or seek to subpoena JS raises an inference that JS's evidence would not have been helpful. JS's absence was unexplained.
When asked who had provided him with a copy of the first White publication, Mr White said it was provided to him by people connected with "the NSW Facebook group". He would not name any of those people and did not call any of those people to give evidence. He did not say those people were unavailable. There were people, known to Mr White, who could have given evidence about when they first saw the first White publication.
Mr White has not established that the late application to amend the Defence to plead the expiration of the limitation period has caused him irremediable prejudice, because he has not established that he could not find anyone to say they had seen the first White publication after 10 December 2020. He did not call people who may have been able to give that evidence. Nor has he established that there were people who had seen the first White publication but could not recall when, so as to establish the prejudice he claims. The two witnesses he called had not seen the publication.
I am not persuaded that there is irremediable prejudice to Mr White, in allowing Ms Dalas leave to rely on the expiration of the limitation period in relation to the first White publication.

[32]

The lack of irremediable prejudice does not necessarily mean Ms Dalas should be granted leave to amend her pleading.
Granting leave to amend is discretionary, and consideration must be given to case management principles and the efficient use of court resources.[11] The explanation for the delay is relevant. An omission or oversight, whilst unfortunate, is not fatal to an application to amend.[12]
The pleadings are not an end in themselves, but are rather a means of ensuring that real issues of controversy are raised for determination, in a way that is procedurally fair. Absent extraordinary circumstances, or the sort of actual prejudice identified in Aon, leave to amend will usually be granted.[13]
The soonest Ms Dalas could have pleaded the expiry of the limitation period would have been when she filed her Defence on 11 April 2023. Mr White did not attempt to serve Ms Dalas until November 2022, nearly twelve months after the proceeding was issued. Ms Dalas was not provided with the Statement of Claim until January 2023. By consent she was not required to file a defence until April 2023, after the provision of further particulars.
The Statement of Claim, served in January 2023, pleaded that Hannay Lawyers had delivered "a Concerns Notice pursuant to s12A of the Act". "The Act" is defined as the Defamation Act 2005 (Qld). This would ordinarily be assumed to mean the Act in operation at the time the proceeding was filed. If an earlier version of the legislation was relied on, that legislation should be specifically identified in the pleading.
It is apparent that, in error, Mr White was attempting to bring his proceeding under the Act in operation as at 10 December 2021. Reference to s12A must be to that legislation, as the former Defamation Act 2005 did not contain s12A. Mr White pleads that the "Defamatory Publications, taken alone or together, create a serious harm to [Mr] White's reputation as contemplated by section 10A of the Act". Again, this must be a reference to the legislation in operation after 10 December 2021 and not the former, operative legislation, which did not contain s10A and did not establish serious harm as an element of the tort.
In her Defence filed 11 April 2023, Ms Dalas admitted that she published the first White publication on 9 November 2020. She otherwise denied or did not admit most of the allegations in the Statement of Claim and pleaded defences of truth, honest opinion, common law qualified privilege, statutory qualified privilege and public interest.
On 7 February 2024, Mr White filed an Amended Statement of Claim to correct the spelling of Ms Dalas' name.
On 26 September 2024, Mr White filed a Further Amended Statement of Claim, in which he defined "the Act" as "the Defamation Act 2005 (Qld) as it applied immediately prior to 1 July 2021".
Ms Dalas filed a Defence to the Further Amended Statement of Claim on 23 October 2024. She did not raise the limitation defence.
On 8 November 2024, Ms Dalas sought leave to file an Amended Defence to the Further Amended Statement of Claim. In that Amended Defence, she sought to rely on the expiration of the limitation period for the first time.
The trial commenced on 18 November 2024, and the question of whether leave ought to be granted for Ms Dalas to rely on her amended pleading was raised on that date. I reserved my decision on the question of whether such leave should be granted on the basis that it was not apparent to me, and would not be apparent until I heard evidence in the trial, whether Mr White was out of time in relation to the first White publication.
I have determined that he was out of time in relation to the first White publication, and there is no irremediable prejudice in allowing Ms Dalas to amend her pleading. I now consider whether the circumstances favour the exercise of the discretion in favour of Ms Dalas.
The purpose of a limitation period is generally to ensure cases are brought to court before relevant evidence is lost, to avoid oppression to a defendant, to enable parties to arrange affairs and utilise resources and to settle disputes as quickly as possible.[14]
However, in defamation matters, the limitation period is deliberately short to reflect the public interest in the speedy resolution of those actions,[15] and as a warning to parties to act promptly.[16]
Mr White acted promptly once he became aware of the first White publication by consulting his solicitor. However, he did not act promptly in filing his claim, and then, for unexplained reasons, did not serve the proceeding for more than a year. By the time the proceedings were served, more than two years had passed since the first White publication.
Had Ms Dalas raised the limitation defence at that time, there would have been no basis upon which Mr White could have obtained an extension of time. Mr White would have been time-barred in relation to the first White publication.
The fact that a limitation defence was available appears to have gone unrecognised by Ms Dalas' lawyer until after the Further Amended Statement of Claim was filed. I do not accept Ms Dalas' submission that Mr White's incorrect identification of the operative legislation meant it was not possible for Ms Dalas to plead the limitation defence earlier. Her lawyer should have identified that the date the pleading was filed was more than a year from the date of publication, notwithstanding that the wrong legislation was pleaded. Neither party has been well served by their lawyers in their drafting of the pleadings. That is a matter between the parties and their lawyers.
This oversight by Ms Dalas' lawyer does not mean that leave should not now be granted. The late amendment has not caused delay, nor did it cause the trial to be adjourned. The prejudice to Ms Dalas in not being allowed an available and complete defence, exceeds any prejudice to Mr White in incurring costs of preparing for trial in relation to one of the publications upon which he sues. It is not apparent that, had the limitation defence been raised earlier, Mr White would have abandoned his claim in relation to that publication. Further, I note that he relies on the imputations conveyed by the first White publication in order to establish identification in the second White publication. It is not apparent in what way Mr White's preparation for trial would have been significantly altered. In any event, any prejudice he can establish in this regard can be ameliorated by appropriate costs orders.
Accordingly, I grant leave to Ms Dalas to amend her Defence to plead the expiration of the limitation period.

[33]

The legislation in effect at the time of the first White publication required a court to extend the limitation period if, and only if, it was not reasonable in the circumstances for the plaintiff to have commenced an action in relation to the matter complained of, within one year from the date of the publication.
Mr White must establish that it was not reasonable to bring an action before 9 November 2021, or as late as 22 November 2021.
In Chen v Evans,[17] Dixon J accepted that a plaintiff who had not been aware of the impugned publication until nearly three years after its publication, satisfied the test. He said it was unreasonable to expect an individual to trawl the internet, looking for defamatory material, in order to vindicate his or her rights before the expiry of the limitation period.[18]
Other cases have examined whether not knowing the identity of the publisher is a circumstance which would make it "not reasonable" to bring proceedings in time. (See for example McMahon v Watkinson.)[19]
Where a plaintiff has engaged in non-litigious processes to vindicate his or her rights, the statutory test of "not reasonable" may also be met. (See for example Ahmed v Harbour Radio Pty Ltd,[20] Noonan v MacLennan[21] and Han v Australian Kung Fu (Wu Shu) Federation Inc.[22]). However, in Pingel v Toowoomba Newspapers Pty Ltd,[23] the decision to grant an extension of time by the trial judge, on the basis that the parties were attempting to resolve the dispute without resort to litigation, was overturned on appeal. The appeal court held there was no prospect that the matter would settle within the limitation period, and no evidence that commencing proceedings would have impaired settlement negotiations.
The Court does not have a discretion to extend time, simply because it seems fair or just. An extension can only be based on the statutory test being met.[24] The provisions of the Limitation of Actions Act differ when it comes to defamation from other general limitation extension rules. The test is an objective one.[25]
Mr White said he paid his solicitor a deposit to commence litigation against Ms Dalas on 17 August 2021. This was well within the limitation period. Mr White said his solicitor seemed to be taking a long time to get anything done and so he pestered him and received a confirmation email on 20 October 2021 that Ms Dalas had been served. In fact, on 19 October 2021, Mr White's solicitor, Christopher Hannay, had sent Ms Dalas a letter of demand.
On 19 October 2021, Ms Dalas responded to that letter by email. She wrote:

[52]

Ms Dalas' intention, when she posted the second White publication, is irrelevant. Even if she was not referring to Mr White, she may be liable if the publication was reasonably capable of referring to him.[28]
The test is whether, in the circumstances, the words would reasonably lead persons to believe the second White publication was "of and concerning him".[29]
In cases where identification is in issue, there is a distinction between cases where the ordinary reasonable reader would know to whom the article referred (for example where a company is identified and the plaintiff is the director of the company, or the publication refers to "the Prime Minister of Australia") and where it would be apparent only to people who had knowledge of special circumstances.[30]
If the plaintiff is not named in the publication, and would only be identifiable because of knowledge of special circumstances, it is necessary to show that the matter was published to a person who had knowledge of those circumstances.
The plaintiff must provide particulars of the facts and matters which are relied on that would cause an ordinary reasonable reader, with knowledge of those facts and matters, to identify the plaintiff.[31]
The burden rests on the plaintiff to prove that there were persons to whom the defamatory matter was published, who had knowledge of the extrinsic facts such that it could be inferred that they would have, or did, identify the plaintiff from the impugned publication. In some circumstances the extrinsic facts will be of sufficient notoriety that it can be fairly presumed that the impugned publication identified the plaintiff to a person with that knowledge. It might be sufficient for a plaintiff to give evidence that people contacted them, where such contact was obviously a response to the publication.[32]
In Prouten v Buxton,[33] Gibson DCJ was satisfied that the plaintiff was identified where she had not been named, but where a photograph had been uploaded to a community Facebook group along with an article warning cyclists that the woman in the photograph was using a stick to interfere with and endanger cyclists. The plaintiff called evidence from her daughter and a police officer who said they recognised her from the photograph. There was also evidence that people continued to refer to the plaintiff as "the stick lady". The Court was satisfied that there was sufficient evidence that people in the plaintiff's very small country town had identified her as the person about whom the imputations were conveyed.
In Andersen v Nine Network Australia Pty Ltd; Andersen v Nationwide News Pty Ltd,[34] the plaintiff claimed she had been defamed by reports in which she was not named. The first defendant had published that Jesse Thompson had been executed three years ago and was in a criminal gang. The second defendant had published that Jesse Thompson was an ice dealer who had been shot dead. The plaintiff said, by reason of the extrinsic facts that she had been the intimate partner of Jesse Thompson and had two children with him, defamatory imputations were conveyed (amongst others) that:

[70]

Curly Sue was aware of Mr White's identity but was also in possession of information that was not obtained from the Therese Therese post, the first White publication or the second White publication. Although I can infer that she was aware that the second White publication was about Mr White, I cannot infer that she identified him from the second White publication and the extrinsic facts. She had information other than the extrinsic facts available to her.
Other than Curly Sue and Ms Dalas, none of the comments on the second White publication assist Mr White in establishing actual identification. They do not show that the readers knew the identity of the persons described, and indeed one commenter, "VL", asked whether AASGAA members ought to be informed of the identity of the people Ms Dalas was writing about, suggesting that this information was not known by all readers of the AASGAA Facebook page.
Nor did Mr White put on any evidence about the cross-pollination between AASGAA and the NSW Facebook group at the time of these publications, aside from his own evidence that they had some members in common. Ms Dalas said that, as at November 2022, there were about 100 common members. There was no evidence about whether these 100 common members were active on the respective Facebook pages.
Mr White pleaded that the trustee and guardianship community is small and members talk amongst themselves. Even accepting that assertion, it does not establish that those who were aware of allegations about him were so aware from the second White publication.
Mr White's evidence, as well as evidence from Ms Dalas and Ms Zuanetti, was that allegations about Mr White's conduct were circulating within the community, prior to the second White publication. Mr White's own publications on his Facebook page established that he had been accused of sexual impropriety, as well as spying and had been removed from the AASGAA Facebook page, well before the second White publication.
On 29 May 2021, six days after the second White publication, Mr White posted on the NSW Facebook page:

[80]

On the basis of these prior publications, readers who followed the NSW Facebook page, would be aware that Mr White had been blocked by AASGAA, was not welcome to attend the AASGAA rally, had attended the AASGAA rally from the sidelines, that women had made allegations of a sexual nature about him and that AASGAA had allegedly been circulating claims that he "propositioned women".
Readers of the second White publication, who had also read the posts on the NSW Facebook page, were likely to be aware that some of the allegations in the second White publication, for example about soliciting sexual favours, were about Mr White. Those readers were likely to identify Mr White in the second White publication; however, those are special circumstances that Mr White has not pleaded as extrinsic facts.
For Mr White to be identified in the second White publication, readers of the AASGAA Facebook page would have had to retain the information from the first White publication six months earlier, in which Mr White had been identified by reference to the Therese Therese post, and conclude that the second White publication was about the same person. I do not accept the submission that the second White publication was a "further response" to the Therese Therese post. If this were correct, I would expect that the "further response" would reference the Therese Therese post, or in some other way, draw readers' attention to it. It is apparent that the second White publication is a discrete post.
Nevertheless, about 451 people had read the Therese Therese post. As not all readers of a post can be assumed to also read the comments on a post, I infer that some smaller number would likely have read the first White publication.
Between the first White publication and the second White publication, there was more than six months in which hundreds, if not thousands, of posts and comments had been published on the AASGAA Facebook page.
There was considerable evidence that in the months between the first and second White publications the AASGAA Facebook page was having a difficult time with people posting about matters that were not directly relevant to guardianship issues. Ms Dalas gave evidence that AASGAA was having a particular problem with "trolls" from Russia and Nigeria infiltrating the Facebook page.
Mr White himself published multiple posts on his NSW Facebook page, criticising AASGAA for allowing its Facebook page to be used as a platform advocating violence and killing of government officials. He gave evidence that the AASGAA Facebook page had published posts from notorious conspiracy theorist Karen Brewer and others.[43] I infer there were many inflammatory and controversial posts on AASGAA in the months between November 2020 and May 2021.
It is common for community websites and Facebook pages to make general and generic statements about the sorts of persons who will be blocked and the types of comments that will be removed. Many, if not most, Facebook pages that allow members of the public to view and comment on posts will, from time to time, remind readers of the rules of that community. Such warnings will often be along the lines of reminders that "bullies will not be tolerated" and people who engage in such behaviour will be removed.
The passage of time, and the multitude of other posts put up in the six months between November 2020 and May 2021, and the generic nature of the first White publication, would mean that ordinary readers of the AASGAA Facebook page, not in possession of the extrinsic facts, would likely consider the second White publication to be the sort of public announcement that is common on such Facebook groups.
Mr White says there was a "lot of chatter" in his circles and people were coming up to him asking if he had engaged in criminal activity. I accept that this evidence raises the inference that he had been identified by the second White publication. What is not apparent is the timing of this "chatter" and whether it occurred before or after he "outed" himself as the person the second White publication was about.
Nevertheless, on balance, there likely were at least some number of people who, aware only of the extrinsic facts, identified Mr White from the second White publication.
At least three people commented on both the Therese Therese post and the second White publication. Those people were likely to have recalled the first White publication and to have drawn the conclusion that Mr White was amongst those identified in the second White publication.
Accordingly, I am satisfied that Mr White was identified by the second White publication by those in possession of the extrinsic facts.

[86]

If Mr White relies on identification as part of a class of persons, he must establish that an aspersion cast against a group or class identifies and attaches to him.[44]
Where allegations are made against an identifiable class of persons, general defamatory imputations may reflect adversely on individuals within the class. For example allegations of government corruption were found to be capable of reflecting adversely on all government ministers - Bjelke-Petersen v Warburton[45] - and allegations of match fixing against a cricket team were found to be sufficient to attach to the captain of the cricket team - David Syme & Co Ltd v Lloyd.[46] That is not the case in this publication. There was no evidence of a known class of trolls.
In the case of McCormick v John Fairfax & Sons Ltd,[47] an allegation about one of three partners in a firm of private investigators was found to be incapable of conveying the imputation that each of the three partners was guilty of alleged the conduct. Importantly in that case, the imputation said to be conveyed was one of guilt, not of suspicion of guilt, and the Court held that an allegation that only one of such a class was guilty was incapable of being reasonably understood as an assertion that all of the class was guilty. At most, the publication would convey a suspicion that each member of the class was guilty.
In Christiansen v Fairfax Media Publications Pty Ltd & Ors,[48] allegations that three managers at a casino had been dismissed for different reasons, without linking a person to the grounds of dismissal, was capable of "casting a cloud of suspicion" over each of them.[49] Inclusion of the plaintiff in a group was capable of leaving the reasonable reader with the impression that there were grounds for suspecting the plaintiff was the culprit.[50]
In Kelly v Burston (No. 2),[51] the plaintiff alleged that the defendant had defamed him in an interview in which the defendant said he had terminated five people for breach of trust. The plaintiff had not been named and said he was identified by being included in a group of five. Gibson, DCJ struck out imputations which were pleaded for all members of the group, not the plaintiff, and imputations of guilt where he was one of a group where only some of those members of the group could be the subject of the imputations.
Imputations are generally considered to be conveyed where an ordinary reasonable reader, having all the characteristics said to belong to such a person (see for example Lewis v Daily Telegraph Ltd),[52] would understand the words to have those meanings.
The circumstances of the publication are also important. The medium of publication may be particularly influential. On social media, the reaction to defamatory matter may be impressionistic and fleeting.
In Andersen, the Court was not satisfied that being in a de facto relationship and having children was sufficient to convey the imputations pleaded. The plaintiff was required to prove that there were people who, by reason of the extrinsic facts, had imputations of the kind pleaded conveyed to them. The factual evidence was missing to establish that those imputations were conveyed about Andersen.
In Bazzi v Dutton,[53] the Full Court of the Federal Court found that external context cannot be referred to, to affect the meaning that a publication conveys to a reader. Where a reader has knowledge of an extrinsic fact that is not within the communities' general knowledge, and is not stated in the matter complained of, the plaintiff must plead the fact to support an innuendo meaning.[54] The Court went on to say that it is the general impression created in the mind of the ordinary reasonable reader of a publication that determines whether it conveys one or more imputations about a claimant.[55] It is not sufficient that a publication is "offensive and derogatory". The plaintiff has the onus to establish, on the balance of probabilities, that the reader reasonably would have understood the publication to convey the imputation he or she asserted it conveyed.[56]

[93]

The ordinary reasonable reader is a person who is of ordinary intelligence and education, who does not look at a publication like a lawyer but views it casually and is prone to a degree of loose thinking. The ordinary reasonable reader reads between the lines and draws inferences, implications and conclusions, particularly derogatory conclusions, more freely than a lawyer. (See Mond v The Age Company Pty Limited).[58]
The ordinary reasonable reader would understand, from the second White publication, that AASGAA would block people who engaged in certain types of behaviour.
Mr White submits that, crucial to the "sting" of the imputation, is that it conveys a meaning that Mr White abuses members of the AASGAA Facebook page because they are members of AASGAA, or that he bullies them on the AASGAA Facebook page. It does not convey a meaning that he bullies people who happen to also be members of AASGAA. Mr White submits that Ms Dalas has put forward no evidence to support a finding that any conduct he has engaged in is either on the AASGAA Facebook page, or because the persons the subject of that conduct are members of AASGAA.
I am not persuaded that the meaning conveyed by the imputation does impute that the conduct occurs on the AASGAA Facebook page, or as a result of the person being an AASGAA member.
If the submission that the conduct would have had to occur on the AASGAA Facebook page were correct, then identification of Mr White by reason of the extrinsic facts would not be made out. Mr White relies on the knowledge that he had been removed from AASGAA and blocked from the Facebook page to establish identification. Accordingly, if he is the person identified as engaging in bullying, abusive, intimidating or harassing conduct, he could not be doing so on the AASGAA Facebook page.
Nor do I accept that the reasonable reader of the words would understand that the imputations conveyed a meaning that the trolls who were blocked were engaging in the alleged conduct towards members of the AASGAA Facebook group because they were members of the Facebook group. There is nothing in the words of the second White publication that conveys this meaning.

[101]

Further, the pleaded imputation that "Mr White targets members of the AASGAA Facebook page and demand that they give him sexual favours" is not conveyed.
The second White publication said people would be blocked who "solicit sexual favours from our members" and "if anyone targets you, anyone asking for money (or other favours) in exchange for advocacy work or sexual favours, please report them to the police". Mr White had posted that he was accused of sexual impropriety by women, prior to the second White publication. Those aware of his own posts about the allegations, would have identified an imputation that he solicited sexual favours as attaching to him. Mr White cannot rely on unpleaded extrinsic facts.
In any event, the pleaded imputation goes well beyond what is actually conveyed. To solicit is to request or ask. It conveys a meaning that one is undertaking a particular course in order to achieve an outcome, but does not contain any connotation of force or coercion. A reasonable reader would understand the use of the word "solicit", particularly in relation to "sexual favours" as to contain an element of exchange. "Soliciting" was, at least in times gone by, a term associated with the payment of money for sex. The term "solicit" does not convey any meaning that, if the request is not met, adverse consequences will follow.
A demand, by contrast, conveys a sense of aggression, force or coercion. A demand conveys a meaning that, if the demand is not met, adverse consequences will follow. That is absent from the meaning of solicit.
The comments of Levine J in Griffith & Ors v John Fairfax Publications Pty Ltd & Ors[59] in relation to the over-reach of a pleaded imputation, are apposite. In that case, the plaintiff pleaded that the publication conveyed a meaning that he was "'a tyrant who does not tolerate questioning of his ideas'". Levine J noted that the word tyrant was not used in the publication. The publication lacked "any notion of oppression, the arbitrary or cruel exercise of power, or sanction against anyone. A reasonable reading of that part of the article as part of the whole might lead to a view of a certain level of intellectual intolerance in Mr Griffiths but not that of a tyrant". The publication was incapable of carrying the imputation.
A plaintiff cannot attempt to bolster their case by ignoring a meaning that is conveyed in order to plead a more serious meaning which is not conveyed. Nothing in the second White publication imputes that anyone, including Mr White, demanded sexual favours, or that Mr White demanded sexual favours in return for advocacy.

[103]

Bullies, harasses and intimidates are, in the context of the pleaded imputation, synonyms. The intention of bullying is invariably to intimidate, though one can intimidate without bullying. One can harass without bullying, but bullying will almost invariably harass. The use of the word "bullies", in this context, conveys a meaning of harassment and intimidation.
The words "it's actually quite frightening the lengths and bullying tactics these individuals will go to!" convey a meaning that the behaviour has occurred multiple times, and the words "quite frightening" convey a meaning that the unwanted conduct it is intimidating or potentially intimidating.
In an online context, the use of words like bullying, harassment, abuse and stalking are bandied about freely. The meaning conveyed by these terms is closer to a meaning of unwelcome, unsavoury and unpleasant conduct, than a meaning of very serious, illegal conduct.
The only reference in the post to "vulnerable people" is in relation to "those who want to use our group to defraud vulnerable people". I have already found that the imputation that "Mr White targets members of the AASGAA Facebook page and demands that they give him money" and the imputation that "Mr White defrauds vulnerable people who need help to stop or prevent elder abuse" are not conveyed, as they do not attach to Mr White.
There is nothing in the second White publication that specifies women as the vulnerable people. It is possible that a reasonable reader would consider that women are more likely to be the target of those seeking to solicit sexual favours, but this is a separate imputation.
The membership of AASGAA likely has a higher percentage of people with vulnerabilities than the general population, by reason of its membership being people who are either under a guardianship order or have had dealings with the guardianship and administration system. I could not extrapolate from that, that all the members of AASGAA are vulnerable. The pleaded imputation is that Mr White bullies, harasses and intimidates vulnerable women who need help to stop or prevent elder abuse. This suggests a meaning that Mr White targets or chooses vulnerable women, rather than other members, and particularly those who need help to stop elder abuse. Nothing in the words of the second White publication could reasonably convey that meaning.
This meaning is not conveyed.
The second White publication alleges that it is especially Ms Dalas, identified as the secretary of AASGAA, and the "core members in the group" who have been the subject of abuse and stalking, who have been asked for money, and who have been the subject of bullying tactics.
The second White publication alleges that there are those who would seek to use AASGAA to defraud vulnerable people. This allegation does not attach to Mr White.
I am not persuaded that the allegation of bullying in the second White publication conveys a meaning that it is vulnerable people who are bullied, nor that it is specifically vulnerable women who are bullied.

[108]

The second White publication contains the phrases "stalks and abuses", "bullying tactics", and "stop stalking members on here".
The meaning of "abuse" varies greatly with context. It can mean to misuse, or to improperly use, to treat with cruelty and violence, to exert power or influence over a person. It can refer to conduct that has a physical, psychological, emotional or financial impact. It can refer to the use of language that is designed to denigrate, belittle, or threaten. Bullying is a kind of abuse.
In the context of Ms Dalas' posts on a Facebook page, the abuse to which she refers would be understood by the ordinary reasonable reader to refer to online abuse. The second White publication provides information to AASGAA members about standards of acceptable conduct, the groups of people who will be blocked, and the organisations with whom AASGAA maintains links. The term "abuse" would not be understood to mean physical abuse. Rather, it would be understood to be conduct that denigrates, belittles, bullies or threatens, or is derogatory about AASGAA or Ms Dalas. It would include conduct that is unwelcome, unpleasant and unsavoury.
To stalk can also have many meanings. It takes on a particular meaning in a criminal context, where it may constitute an offence. Such stalking requires an element of intention to cause physical or mental harm by engaging in a course of conduct. However, the ordinary reasonable reader, while understanding that stalking can constitute a criminal offence, would take the meaning of stalk from the context in which it was used.
In everyday language, it is common to hear the term "stalk" to mean something very different from a criminal offence. One might, for example, "stalk" a new friend by looking through their social media profiles, in an innocuous information-gathering exercise, or "online stalk" a potential romantic partner by looking at who they follow, or who follows them, on social media.
The ordinary reasonable reader of the second White publication would likely understand the imputation that Mr White "stalks" members of the AASGAA Facebook page, to be that he had an unwanted interest in, and engaged in unwanted conduct in relation to, members of the AASGAA Facebook page, particularly Ms Dalas. Stalking in this context might include repeatedly posting about AASGAA or Ms Dalas, having unwanted contact with Ms Dalas and others through email or text messages, or physical attendance where he was not welcome.
I am satisfied that ordinary reasonable readers would understand imputations that Mr White abuses and stalks Ms Dalas (identified in the publication as the secretary of AASGAA) and other members are conveyed. The ordinary reasonable reader would understand the meaning to be that Ms Dalas and others had been the subject of verbal denigration, bullying behaviour and belittlement, and stalking behaviour which might include being repeatedly contacted by email or phone when such contact was unwanted, or having multiple posts published about them, or being physically followed or observed.

[109]

In relation to the pleading of imputations by way of true innuendo, where they purport to go beyond the pleaded imputations by importing a notion of dishonest misuse of Mr White's position as an activist, I do not accept that any of those imputations are conveyed.
To the extent that Mr White's position as an activist is relevant, it arises in this way. The second White publication said AASGAA refuses to associate with groups or advocates that have a criminal history, take advantage of their own loved ones, ask us and others for money, or associate with people of that calibre. Ms Dalas says "our links are only with trusted groups/advocates with impeccable backgrounds. We will not associate nor have predators of this nature on our site". She then goes on to say, "Our only links are NASGA, Elaine Renoire & Marney Oakley Marney Poland-Morris who have supported many Australians over the years, even BEFORE our group was created".
A reasonable reader would not conclude from these statements that individuals and groups who are not mentioned amongst the "links" to AASGAA were therefore people who were not trusted or do not have impeccable backgrounds. The identified links are further qualified by the statement that they are groups and individuals who have "supported many Australians over the years" and did so before AASGAA was created.
Those with knowledge of the extrinsic facts would likely be aware that Mr White had his own group. From Mr White's post, dated 15 May 2021, some might be aware that AASGAA had asked Mr White to remove references to AASGAA from his website. At the very highest, those who read both that post and the second White publication might conclude that Ms Dalas was identifying Mr White's group as a group with advocates that fell into one of the identified categories or as a group that associated with "people of that calibre". However, the imputation that Mr White used his position as an activist to dishonestly misuse his position is not conveyed. There is nothing to support a finding that it was Mr White's position as an advocate that caused him to stalk or abuse. None of the imputations pleaded by way of true innuendo are made out.

[113]

(a) a "Melbourne based woman" had been "led" into trolling and hacking his site by another woman. The "second woman" is also based in Melbourne and sent him an offensive and defamatory email in response to his investigations;

(b) a "Melbourne based woman" who had been disrupting the NSW Facebook page, and had complained against JS, had been manipulated by another woman;

(c) "a prominent person in our movement" had made allegations of spying against Mr White and told people to avoid contact with Mr White and his group;

(d) the AASGAA meeting in September 2019 which had resulted in details of attendees being made available to NSWTG, was something that readers should take up with AASGAA;

(e) AASGAA has told its members that RP's Queensland group is about to fold when nothing is further from the truth;

(f) RP is a shining example of the movement and will never attack those who are part of the movement;

(g) AASGAA removed RP from its Facebook page;

(h) Ms Zuanetti's actions resulted in RP and JS being removed as members of AASGAA;

(i) MW had undergone a terrible shock when "certain persons" betrayed her trust and circulated defamatory and unfounded allegations against her;

(j) AASGAA removed MW as a member;

(k) AASGAA failed to support MW "the way one would have expected" and instead "made some very serious and totally unrelated allegations of its own against her". Mr White has no idea what AASGAA hopes to achieve by doing this;

(l) AASGAA told him to avoid contact with MW. He later learned the truth about the allegations made against MW;

(m) AASGAA had not acknowledged the work of MW who was responsible for transforming AASGAA from an unknown group to the group that held such a well-attended meeting on the Gold Coast;

(n) MW was a victim of ASSGAA;

(o) AASGAA had made "malicious" and "very serious" allegations against MW;

(p) AASGAA has betrayed MW and circulated defamatory and unfounded allegations against her, after she obtained valuable media exposure for them;

(q) AASGAA has lost its direction and has only been spiralling downhill ever since MW was "silenced";

(r) The person who made allegations about Mr White was the same as the person behind all the previous allegations being circulated against MW;

(s) One of the people in the movement who is associated with AASGAA had attempted to have JS removed from Facebook. These people exploit and use vulnerable people for their own ends;

(t) The woman who engaged in "sabotaging activities" remains a member of AASGAA and its "inner private group";

(u) AASGAA's meeting at the RSL was a meeting in the "lions den";

(v) AASGAA's Facebook page is used as a platform advocating violence and killing of government officials;

(w) AASGAA is a platform for threats;

(x) People who hold those views about violence and killing are members of AASGAA;

(y) AASGAA lacks legitimacy because it allows a member advocating violence and killing to remain as a member and removes good people like JS and RP;

(z) There is a question as to who is really behind AASGAA;

(aa) AASGAA presents "us all" to the general public as a bunch of thugs and hit men;

(bb) AASGAA accused him of being a spy for the public trustees;

(cc) AASGAA had his Facebook page sabotaged;

(dd) the leader of a Melbourne-based organisation made some extremely damaging and false allegations against him;

(ee) AASGAA gave his phone and contact details to people who called him to make nuisance calls, made comments designed to ridicule and put him up for contempt and proposition him;

(ff) those associated with AASGAA circulated untrue allegations that he propositioned women who were the victims of guardianship rackets and abuses;

(gg) AASGAA allows outrageous comments that "make us all look crazy to the general public and destroy our credibility as a movement";

(hh) Four Corners has declined to meet with "key figures" in the NSW group;

(ii) AASGAA has been spending a considerable amount of money promoting itself as the voice for the movement in New South Wales which it most certainly is not;

(jj) AASGAA has claimed that if you want your stories told on Four Corners you will need to go through AASGAA;

(kk) ASSGAA has claimed all the credit for the media exposure up in Queensland when in reality that media exposure had occurred due to the efforts of the Queensland-based group;

(ll) AASGAA had only supported street rallies against wearing masks and social distancing.

[133]

The tone of this post suggests he believed he was being very generous to Ms Zuanetti, who had made unflattering comments about his conduct, by telling his readers they must not be too harsh; however, by disclosing that her own family had ceased to support her, he either deliberately or obliviously disclosed hurtful private information.
Ms Zuanetti said this was cruel and she felt he owed her an apology.
Ms Zuanetti also said she felt harassed by Mr White from his posts, and intimidated by him during their meeting. I accept that she felt very uncomfortable at the meeting and was scared when he appeared to follow her to Woolworths.
I am not satisfied that Mr White actually followed Ms Zuanetti to Woolworths. It is more likely that he was walking in the same direction and was oblivious to her discomfort. I consider this more likely, having observed Mr White during the trial, read his numerous posts, and listened to his evidence. Mr White gave evidence about a number of matters that caused me to conclude that he was, at least on occasion, oblivious to how his behaviour could be perceived.
For example, Mr White gave evidence that a woman, MT, had approached him and asked him to contact the Public Trustee because it was refusing to provide any money for her to take her mother out to dinner for her birthday. Mr White said he told MT that if she provided her bank details, he would just give her the money to take her mother out. She declined.
In giving this evidence, Mr White did not appear to have considered that accepting money from someone, when one had asked for advocacy help, might make the recipient feel indebted or uncomfortable, irrespective of whether the motive of the offeror was pure generosity. Such an offer might also be disempowering. Accessing one's own money from one's trustee or guardian, might provide a sense of accomplishment that accepting money from someone else cannot. I draw no conclusions that the person to whom he offered the money actually felt uncomfortable. The fact that she declined the offer, however, suggested that she was not driven solely by achieving the outcome of taking her mother out to dinner. Mr White used this as an example of the way he supported people struggling with guardianship issues. However, this episode also demonstrates, to me, a lack of insight and an inability to consider that even well-intentioned conduct could make someone uncomfortable or be misconceived.
A further example of Mr White's apparent inability to consider how his actions might be perceived relates to his evidence about CC. Mr White said that, at the Queensland conference, CC was sobbing and visibly distraught because the Trustee had taken over the funds the daughter had been awarded as a result of the car accident. The daughter was not in CC's care and she did not know where the daughter was.
Mr White said he was "surprised" that Ms Dalas had not offered to fund a private investigator to find the daughter for CC. He offered to put up the money to locate CC's daughter. He had several meetings with CC and engaged a private investigator who located CC's daughter.
Mr White agreed to help CC obtain guardianship of her daughter. He said he subsequently changed his mind because he formed the view that CC was not fit to be her daughter's guardian due to her heavy consumption of alcohol. Mr White gave evidence about the quantity and type of alcohol CC had consumed in his presence and its effect on her.
He said he informed CC he would pay for her to visit her daughter but could not support her guardianship application because she was drunk all the time. After this conversation, CC made allegations to him and others that he was encroaching on her boundaries. Mr White said he was not quite clear what she meant by "encroaching on her boundaries" and that she could have meant her "emotional boundaries".
He said he has since learned that he could have got himself into a lot of trouble in locating the daughter because CC had assaulted the daughter and the Public Trustee had put the daughter into hiding for protection. He heard from RP that the elder daughter had guardianship of her sister and they had gone into hiding from CC because of her past abuse.
This episode demonstrates a lack of insight on Mr White's behalf. Mr White must have been aware that there are a number of reasons why a person might not have guardianship of a child, and that those reasons might involve, on occasion, substance abuse, or mental and physical disability.
One would have expected Mr White, who had experience within the guardianship system, to have conducted basic due diligence before hiring an investigator to locate someone, in circumstances where he clearly was not aware of all the facts. Enquiries within his own networks would, it appears, have disclosed the reason CC was not aware of her daughter's location.
I make no finding about what actually occurred between CC and her daughter. I have only a hearsay account and make no findings as to its veracity. I am setting out the evidence Mr White gave, because it illustrates his credulousness, and his apparent lack of insight into the potential ramifications of his own conduct.
Mr White wrote on his NSW Facebook page about his experience with CC and said that he could not support her application for guardianship "because of the mother's alcohol and drug dependency". He went on to say that he "recognised that she was a very troubled woman". He did not appear to recognise that it might be inappropriate to ventilate allegations that a member of the NSW Facebook group, potentially identifiable to those who were in attendance at the Queensland conference or who were otherwise aware that Mr White had located her daughter, had an issue with alcohol and drug dependency and was, as a result, not a fit guardian.[66]
Mr White's professed commitment to openness and transparency and to reporting the facts as he perceives them - for example, "I am only stating the facts as to what has taken place";[67] "I will let people read and make their own judgments about what I have posted as to whether my postings were made to attack and bully";[68] "as she has been insulting to no one other than myself in what she wrote, I will be leaving her comments in place for everybody to see"[69] - appeared to render him, at least on occasion, oblivious to the impact of his publications, the way in which his statement might be perceived and the rights of others to privacy.
Further, he appeared to be surprisingly ready to accept rumours and allegations and to repeat them as if they were proven facts. His evidence about MW was illustrative in this regard. He repeatedly defended MW on his NSW Facebook page and described her in glowing terms, despite the fact that she had been charged and convicted of harassing a social worker on social media. At trial, Mr White gave evidence that "we found out later that Christine Dallas [sic] had been involved with [the] social worker thing" and that Ms Dalas had "got (MW) to name the social worker in what she posted". This allegation was unsupported by evidence and was not put to Ms Dalas. Mr White characterised MW's crime as "unfortunately (MW) made the mistake of naming a social worker when discussing that social worker's improper conduct on social media. This resulted in (MW) being placed under a social media ban." He did not identify that MW had been charged and convicted of criminal offences, nor did he detail the content and nature of the harassment for which MW was convicted. His evidence in court about the supposed role of Ms Dalas in MW's criminal offending appeared to be a further attempt to denigrate Ms Dalas, based on information he had received and believed, without checking its veracity.
These are just a handful of examples of Mr White's conduct online and in court. The evidence demonstrates that he repeatedly and persistently posted about AASGAA and Ms Dalas in derogatory and denigrating terms, and invited readers to draw negative inferences about her and her organisation.
I am persuaded that Mr White's conduct, both online and during his meeting with Ms Zuanetti, when he disparaged and denigrated Ms Dalas and AASGAA, amounted to abuse, bullying, harassment and intimidation of both Ms Dalas and Ms Zuanetti.
Accordingly, I am satisfied that Ms Dalas has established a defence of truth, or justification pursuant to s25 of the Defamation Act 2005 (Qld), in relation to the imputation "Mr White abuses members of the AASGAA Facebook page".

[147]

The first Dalas publication was published by Mr White on 16 March 2022 on his NSW Facebook page.
It started off "Many of you have expressed your disappointment that NSWTG did not get a mention in what was presented on Four Corners last night. However, this should not have been a surprise as Four Corners and the ABC worked in very closely with the leader of the AASGAA group as to what would go on the programme and she had made it very clear that those who closely associated themselves with the NSW group would not have their stories told".
Mr White then said it was "surprise" that Four Corners gave the AASGAA group and its leader so much coverage "when's AASGAA's leader was heavily involved in promoting the illegal anti lockdown, anti mask street rallies which took place last year and which the ABC had condemned".
He said "AASGAA's leader promoted these illegal rallies on AASGAA's Facebook page against the wishes of many of her own members who did not want to alienate the broader public, even travelling between Melbourne and Sydney to take part in these rallies when the state borders were supposed to be closed".
He said: "Even more concerning is the close alliance AASGAA and its leaders has with fringe overseas groups and organisations". He goes on to say that AASGAA's leader expressed her "disapproval at the tactics used by the police in Australia to disperse those taking part in the illegal rallies ... She failed to express any shock or horror when TS Radio told her that her members should 'rise up with armaments, get arms' to use against the police ... and instead basically went along with the idea". He said "AASGAA's leader told the Magistrates Court in Melbourne last January that she was not the blonde-haired woman in the video being arrested outside Government House in Sydney on 31st August as she was under lockdown in Melbourne at the time. Anyone watching the Four Corners video and the video of the rally will be able to see it is one and the same person".
Ms Dalas pleads this conveys the following imputations:

[149]

Mr White denies any of the imputations were conveyed.
The overall tone of the first Dalas publication, and of all the publications, created an impression of objectivity. Although the posts were written by Mr White, he used the word "we" to create an impression that the matters raised were being raised collectively. He created an impression in the publications that he was responding to questions, concerns or issues raised by others. He created an impression that he was reporting on factual matters, in the interests of others and without any personal stake in the game. His publications are all articulate and well written. He did not make spelling or grammatical errors. This gave his publications a veneer of reliability and respectability. A publication that deploys "ALL CAPS", bold type and exclamation marks may raise a red flag in the mind of the reasonable reader to take what is said with a pinch of salt. On the other hand, Mr White's publications struck a tone of reason and objectivity.
However, despite his careful use of language, Mr White was, it appears, resentful that AASGAA had a higher profile than his own advocacy group. He perceived this as unfair. It was important to him that he inform his readership that AASGAA and Ms Dalas were undeserving recipients of mainstream media attention because, unlike him, they had blocked people from their Facebook page, made allegations about him and others and, in his view, engaged in conduct which meant they were not appropriate representatives for the movement of which he was a part.
The first Dalas publication said Ms Dalas expressed her disapproval of police tactics and failed to express any shock or horror at the suggestion that her members should use armaments but instead "basically went along with the idea".
The ordinary reasonable reader would understand that Mr White was critical of Ms Dalas' conduct for failing to express shock or horror at the suggestion that AASGAA members take up arms. The criticism for failing to express shock or horror does not convey a meaning that Ms Dalas supported the suggestion that her members should "take up armaments". The words "she basically went along with the idea" convey a meaning that she did not speak out against the call, but would not convey to the reader that she was therefore in agreement with the call to arms. Readers understand that criticism is often levelled at those who fail to speak out against certain kinds of conduct or speech, without readers understanding that criticism to extend to an allegation that the failure to speak out against a position is equivalent to an endorsement of the position.
Mr White submits that the word "support" has a meaning, in this context, of "advocates for", and that nothing in the first Dalas publication conveys a meaning that Ms Dalas advocates the use of arms against the government. He submits that readers would understand from the publication that, at its highest, Ms Dalas was "entertaining the notion" that her members should take up arms. There is a significant gap, Mr White says, between advocating and entertaining a notion.
I accept that submission. Readers, bringing with them a degree of loose thinking and taking an impressionistic view, would understand that Mr White's words that Ms Dalas "basically went along with" the idea that her members should take up arms, would not convey a meaning that Ms Dalas advocated such a proposition. The meaning that Ms Dalas, while leader of AASGAA, supports the use of armaments against law enforcement, is not conveyed.
The second imputation, is not properly pleaded, failing to set out who suspects Ms Dalas of supporting arms.
For the same reasons the first imputation is not conveyed, the third imputation, that there are reasonable grounds to suggest Ms Dalas supports violence and the use of arms, is not conveyed.
The fourth imputation, that there are reasonable grounds to suspect that Ms Dalas lied in Court in the course of giving evidence, is conveyed. The first Dalas publication says Ms Dalas told a Magistrates' Court that she was not the "blonde haired woman" in the video being arrested, but anyone watching the Four Corners video (which did feature Ms Dalas) and the video of the rally "will be able to see it is one and the same person". Although Mr White denied the imputation was conveyed in his Defence, he made no submissions and tacitly accepted it was conveyed. The plain words of the publication demonstrate the imputation was conveyed.
Similarly, the fifth pleaded imputation, that Ms Dalas was arrested outside Government House suspected of a criminal offence, is conveyed. Mr White wrote that the video shows a blonde-haired woman being arrested which is the same person as the woman in the Four Corners video. Ms Dalas was the person in the Four Corners video. He wrote that at the time of the arrest, Ms Dalas was under lockdown in Melbourne. To have been arrested outside Government House, Ms Dalas must have been suspected of committing a criminal offence.

[160]

Mr White denies any of the pleaded imputations were conveyed. However, he made no submissions in relation to the imputations that Ms Dalas organised an anti-lockdown protest rally in defiance of health orders, or that Ms Dalas was arrested by police in connection with organising protest rallies and refusing to wear a mask. The plain words of the second Dalas publication convey these imputations.
Mr White submits that the entirety of the second Dalas publication made it clear that he was critical of Ms Dalas for not objecting or expressing horror at "the notion" of taking up arms. This does not amount to support. He referred to "groups" which made it clear he is not referring to Ms Dalas, but rather to TS Radio. Further, he did not say that the groups supported the use of arms, but merely that the groups were "entertaining a notion". At its highest, it could only be said that Ms Dalas was promoting a group which entertained a notion of using arms. In that context, a reasonable reader would not consider that Ms Dalas, as an individual, had promoted the use of arms.
I am satisfied that by saying that Ms Dalas "regularly has AASGAA's members listen in and take part" in Marti Oakley's program, a reasonable reader would understand that Ms Dalas was promoting or encouraging her members to listen to the program. Readers would understand that Ms Dalas cannot compel her members to do anything. By saying that, on Marti Oakley's program, those members "are being told to take up arms against the police brought in to disperse their illegal rallies" and that Ms Dalas, as a guest on the program, failed to object to such a notion, the ordinary reasonable reader would understand Marti Oakley's program promoted that message. Mr White conveyed a meaning that Ms Dalas encouraged her members to listen to a program where they would be told to take up arms against the police, and Ms Dalas did not object or express horror to that notion. That falls short of the pleaded imputations that Ms Dalas supports, is suspected of supporting, or that there are grounds to suggest that she supports the use of arms against the police. The imputations are not conveyed.

[205]

Evidence of actual harm may not always be required. Inference that serious harm to reputation has been caused may be sufficient when defamation conveys a gravely serious meaning. Actual evidence of harm may not be necessary, particularly if the defamatory matter is in a mass media publication.[90]
That proposition, however, does not mean the inherent tendency of the words is enough to establish serious harm. One must evaluate all the evidence including the circumstances of the publication, the mode of publication and any grapevine effect that would lead to an inference of serious harm.
Any expectation that a claimant should be able to call numerous witnesses who read or heard the defamatory publication and are prepared to say they thought less of the complainant as a result should be tempered by the reality that a claimant may struggle to identify or to produce evidence from all of those to whom an article was published and in whose eyes the claimant's reputation was damaged.[91]
Where publication is very limited, the extent to which the complainant can rely on inference will be significantly constrained.[92]
Mr White, relying on a line of UK authorities, says Ms Dalas must establish that each publication caused her serious harm to her reputation, and she cannot rely on the aggregation of harm caused by all the publications. The test in the UK is whether the components of an actionable tort have been made out to the relevant standard and this means that each and every element must be made out in relation to each publication complained of and in relation to each claimant. It is impermissible to rely on the cumulative effect of the publications complained of.
However, because of the wording of the UK legislation, a publication that does not, or would not, cause serious harm, is not defamatory. Logically a claimant in the UK must prove serious harm for each publication.
That is different from the Australian legislation which envisages that a publication may be defamatory, but there is no actionable tort, unless the publication of "defamatory matter" about a person has caused, or is likely to cause, serious harm to reputation. The requirement for serious harm to reputation is a threshold to be met before a claim exists, rather than an element of the definition of defamatory matter.
In Australia, the serious harm must be shown to be attached to the publication of defamatory matter. It is not apparent, from the wording of the legislation, that, in the context of multiple defamatory matters by the same person, each must have separately caused serious harm.
In Peros,[93] Applegarth J noted that, as a matter of first principles, a defendant is only liable for the harm to reputation caused by its publication, not for harm by other publications or other causes. The plaintiff must attempt to isolate the harm caused by the publication of which he or she complains. Sometimes there may be indivisible damage and a plaintiff could sue where the defendant's publication was "a cause" or materially contributed to damage which is indivisible. In those cases, it would be sufficient that the wrong, along with other wrongs, caused the same loss or damage.
In Mond v The Age Company Pty Limited,[94] Wheelahan J found that The Age had published, in December 2021 and February 2022, two articles on each date which conveyed defamatory imputations about Mond. He found the cumulative effect of the December 2021 articles, and the separate cumulative effect of the February 2022 articles, had caused serious harm to the plaintiff's reputation. He found that harm to reputation caused by separate publications of the same or substantially the same matter may be aggregated. However, the serious harm element must be established for each particular defamatory matter on which the applicant sues and otherwise establishes liability, and not by reference to the accumulated consequences of various publication of different matters, some of which were not defamatory. He went on to say that that did not mean that other publications may not have a relevant bearing on whether the matter sued on caused serious harm. Prior publications may be admissible on the question of causation.[95]
I take this to be that, where the same or substantially the same defamatory matter is published on numerous occasions, the harm can be aggregated for the purposes of determining whether there has been serious harm. But the harm caused by the publication of different defamatory matter cannot be aggregated to determine serious harm.
The defamatory imputations I have found conveyed fall into three categories:

[207]

I am satisfied that the arrest imputations have an inherent tendency to cause serious harm. The ordinary reasonable reader is likely to consider that someone who has been arrested may have committed a criminal offence. The arrest imputations were conveyed by the first, second, third, fourth and fifth Dalas publications.
The inherent tendency of the words also must be viewed in the context in which the arrest was alleged to have occurred.
This was not just an arrest at a protest. This was an arrest said to have occurred at an illegal lockdown protest, and where Ms Dalas was said to be committing an offence by attending when Victoria was in lockdown.
While it can be difficult to turn one's mind back to the pandemic, one readily recalls that events that occurred during the pandemic had a different flavour than events at other times. Attending a protest rally might, in the ordinary course of life, be a relatively uncontroversial thing to do. Getting arrested at a protest might be suggestive of the strength of one's commitment to a cause, or might be a result of simply disobeying a police order to move on. Outside a pandemic, there would be few in the community who would generally disagree with a right to protest. However, in the context of COVID demonstrations, community views were wildly divergent. There were many in the community who considered attendance at an anti-lockdown rally to be akin to expressing a blatant disregard for the health and wellbeing of one's fellow citizens. Attendance at such rallies became a polarising and politically divisive subject. Assumptions were made, perhaps too readily, by many in the community, the media and government, about the sorts of people who would attend rallies and their likely motivations.
While some in the community would have lauded Ms Dalas attending a rally and getting arrested for her trouble, many others would have decried her actions and made assumptions about her beliefs and motivations. Those assumptions may well have been antithetical to her work on behalf of the vulnerable and disabled in guardianship matters.
A very genuine debate raged, during the pandemic, about whether lockdowns should be imposed on all, to protect those vulnerable to COVID, or whether the vulnerable should be protected in other ways, for example by requiring only the elderly and vulnerable to isolate, leaving the more robust to get on with their lives as normal. Those who took one view made harsh accusations about those who took the other. As a society we became more divided and more polarised. I have no reason to think that the guardianship community did not reflect the broader community, in that there would have been a range of views.
Indeed, it was apparent from the evidence that some of those who believed Ms Dalas had attended or organised anti-lockdown rallies thought that was a good thing. Others did not support such views. I am satisfied that the inherent tendency of the words to cause harm is high, and that, in the context of the COVID pandemic, the inherent tendency of the words to cause harm, at least in the minds of a large section of society, was even higher than would ordinarily be the case.
Therefore, the inherent tendency of the words to cause harm is heightened by the fact that the arrest was said to have occurred as the result of attendance at an illegal lockdown protest in Sydney, when Ms Dalas was under lockdown orders in Melbourne.

[210]

Ms Dalas said she was in contact with the team at Four Corners for about two-and-a-half years before the program, State Control, aired in March 2022.
In about November 2021, she received a call from Anne Connolly, a journalist from the ABC. Ms Connolly told Ms Dalas she had received an email and video of a person being arrested at a protest in Sydney. Ms Connelly asked Ms Dalas if it was her. Ms Connolly told Ms Dalas that Mr White had sent her the video. This is consistent with Mr White's statements in his publication that Ms Connolly was aware of his allegation that Ms Dalas had been arrested at a protest in Sydney when she was under lockdown orders in Melbourne.
Ms Dalas told Ms Connolly that the woman was not her. I infer that the video and the TS Radio podcast did not cause Ms Dalas' reputation harm in the eyes of Ms Connolly, because Ms Connolly went on to interview Ms Dalas in late January or early February 2022 for the Four Corners program. I am satisfied that prior publication of the imputations by Mr White to Ms Connolly did not cause serious harm to Ms Dalas' reputation. At most, the publication of those imputations to Ms Connolly caused Ms Connolly to ask Ms Dalas whether it was her in the video.
Ms Dalas said, after the Four Corners program aired, she was very proud that the issues she cared about had been the subject of a major investigation. She said AASGAA received over a thousand emails after the program aired, and the administrators of AASGAA were fielding many calls and emails.
When the second White publication, the APTAGIE "Review" of the Four Corners program, was posted, she found that Googling her name brought up the APTAGIE review.
She said since the publications, she has been called many times and asked if she had been arrested. She said after the fifth Dalas publication, she received over thirty phone calls asking about it. She said a common theme was that people were looking at the photographs and comparing the photograph of her with the photograph of the woman being arrested. They would ask her if it was her and if it was true that she had been arrested.
She said she would sometimes receive calls about guardianship and then, during the course of the call, she would be asked about the video and whether it was her. She said there was a period of at least six months after the fifth Dalas publication when she was receiving daily calls about the publication. She said until the fifth Dalas publication was removed, every phone call she received about guardianship or advocacy matters mentioned that publication.
She said the day before the criminal hearing in relation to Mr White's breach of the PSIO on 24 September 2024, the fifth publication was removed. She said the second publication was republished under a new URL link.
She said, in the wake of the Four Corners program, she had expected a flood of emails. AASGAA initially received the expected flood, which she described as about five emails a day, but this very soon tapered down. There was a particularly noticeable reduction in August 2022 and again in November 2022 after the fifth Dalas publication. By December 2022, she was getting "maybe" one enquiry a week.
She agreed in cross-examination that she had appeared on radio two or three times after the Four Corners program, and that she had helped convene a successful conference in Adelaide attended by between one and two hundred people, after the publications.
She agreed that, after closing the AASGAA Facebook page in 2023, enquiries in relation to guardianship matters had dropped off significantly.
She said she was sent an email from an administrator, "SL", of a Queensland Facebook group "Expose the Public Trustee" which included a link to the sixth Dalas publication. Prior to this time, she had a good relationship with SL. They were both advocates and would touch base every six months or so. Ms Dalas has expertise in preparing a budget to determine how money is being invested and also expertise in reading trustee reports. She helped SL in 2018 and 2019. When SL contacted her, she told Ms Dalas that she thought the sixth Dalas publication was inappropriate but expressed her general support for Ms Dalas and said she, SL was an "anti vaxxer and proud of it". This suggests that, although SL did not necessarily think less of Ms Dalas as a result of Mr White's post, she did think Ms Dalas was a kindred spirit in the anti-vax movement. Ms Dalas felt she had to respond and wrote "I would like to clarify: I am not a Covid protestor and have never been arrested in my life".[96]
Ms Dalas said this caused her to be concerned about what others were thinking. She noticed that a lot of Mr White's posts were published on SL's Facebook page. She stopped hearing from SL and a lot of other advocates in the wake of the publications. She assumed from this that they had believed what Mr White had written about her.
Another poster, "JT", wrote on the Queensland Facebook group that he did not know whether the woman in Mr White's photograph (presumably referring to the photograph in the fifth Dalas publication) was Ms Dalas or not, but that he supported the anti-lockdown protests.[97]
Ms Dalas said this sort of comment was consistent with her own experience, where people would assume that she was a COVID protestor. Ms Dalas said there were about 100 people who were members of AASGAA and also members of the NSW Facebook page, as at about November 2022.
A commenter on the first White publication, DA, asked "What is AASGAA?". In response, a person called "AC" posted "A pain in the posterior founded and led by a self promoting limelight addict out of Melbourne who holds extreme right-wing views and associations-among other things" and then "We are known and judged by the company we keep. Keep the wrong company or promote it and one can be acutely compromised permanently. I personally choose not to be associated with AASGAA after having been heavily involved with it's [sic] beginning".[98] Ms Dalas said AC was a person she had had a lot of dealings with over the years, that he was aware of her personal story, and that he was a member of AASGAA at the time these comments were made. She did not agree that AC already had a negative view of her prior to the White publications. She said she had not had any contact with him for a while and thought he had died. She was not aware that he harboured negative views about her prior to his comment in the wake of Mr White's publication.
Ms Dalas was also asked about the arrest video by another AASGAA member, "KB". Ms Dalas told KB that the person in the arrest video was not her. It appears that KB came to believe Ms Dalas was responsible for having her committed to the Fixated Persons Unit. KB commented on Mr White's NSW Facebook page and also contacted Ms Zuanetti, in negative terms about Ms Dalas. Ms Dalas considered KB was a person with whom she had a relationship, until Mr White published his allegations about her.
In January 2023, Ms Dalas was contacted by a person, "DS", who worked for Alliance Nursing. Ms Dalas and Julia Siciliano had been assisting a member, "PR", with NDIS and guardianship matters. PR had appeared on the Four Corners program. Ms Dalas had had a number of conversations with DS that were positive. "Out of nowhere", DS emailed Ms Dalas and said she had looked up the AASGAA website and now wanted to know AASGAA's policies and procedures. She also said that, although Ms Dalas had a police check and a working with children's check, it was a legislative requirement in the ACT, where PR was located, to have a "vulnerable persons card", and she requested Ms Dalas provide that. Ms Dalas formed the view that DS's behaviour had changed as a result of searching for AASGAA online and likely being exposed to the publications by Mr White.
Ms Dalas said another AASGAA member, "BP", had previously posted positively about AASGAA and commended its work. BP was also a member of the NSW Facebook page. After the first Dalas publication, BP made negative comments about AASGAA and removed herself from the AASGAA group.
Ms Dalas said another member of AASGAA, "CT", was a regular poster on AASGAA's Facebook page.[99] He posted on the NSW Facebook page "this is terrible", in response to a Mr White post of 13 May 2022 about the Personal Safety Intervention Order Ms Dalas had taken out. Ms Dalas understood this to mean that CT believed the post and it could be inferred had seen and believed the first and second Dalas publications.
Ms Dalas said another AASGAA member, "TRJ", had been a member of AASGAA since 1 January 2021. She wrote on Mr White's NSW Facebook page in response to his 13 May 2022 post "The woman is deranged, Gary, as a woman who passionately supports anybody victimised by another and knowing what courage it takes to ask for help, she disgusts me. She is exactly the reason why some people aren't taken seriously".
Gloria Holland, who gave evidence for Mr White at the trial, wrote on the NSW Facebook page about Ms Dalas "methinks her brain is somewhat addled". Ms Holland's daughter, "TZ", was a person with whom Ms Dalas had had contact and discussion over the years. Ms Dalas said she and TZ helped each other with advocacy issues. Ms Dalas said in the wake of Mr White's publications, she ceased hearing from TZ and counted this as a lost relationship caused by Mr White's publications.

[213]

Anna Christodoulides used to be married to Ms Dalas' husband's brother. After her marriage broke up, she remained close with Ms Dalas. She said that in about May 2022, she wanted to show her girlfriend a post about the Four Corners' program. She Googled Ms Dalas' name and "something came up" that said Ms Dalas was an anti-lockdown protester who had gone to Sydney. Ms Christodoulides did not believe it. She said she knew that Ms Dalas had not gone to Sydney because they live close to each other and see each other regularly. She also knew immediately that the woman in the video was not Ms Dalas.
Later in the year, in about November 2022, Ms Christodoulides again Googled Ms Dalas. She found an article that she described as "very well written and convincing", which talked about Ms Dalas being anti-police, wanting to rise up against the police with arms, with guns, and talked about Ms Dalas being associated with controversial women that Ms Christodoulides had never heard of. The article was very convincing because it seemed to be stating facts and had a police emblem on it. She was shown the fifth Dalas publication and said that it looked like the article she had read. She said she was very worried because this article was not describing the person she knew. She felt she could not let her children go to see their "Aunty Christine" until she had investigated the allegations.
She said the person described in the article was not the person she knew. She said Ms Dalas was a Labor supporter, was against guns, believes in the police and that police are there to protect us. Ms Dalas was not anti-police. She said Ms Dalas is law-abiding and that they share the same views, which is why they get on well. The allegations in the article had her very concerned. She said: "When you throw some mud, some sticks."
The whole podcast was hyperlinked to the article, and so she listened to the full program which went for about two hours. She said it was quite boring and she would not have listened to it if Ms Dalas was not her sister-in-law.
After she listened to the podcast, she said she was a bit confused. She held off contacting Ms Dalas. Eventually, Ms Dalas rang, they talked and she realised "it was all rubbish". She said she did not take anything that was said on the podcast to be Ms Dalas saying "We should rise up against the police". After she spoke with Ms Dalas, she was satisfied that Ms Dalas did not have the views attributed to her in the article.
Had Ms Dalas held those views, it would have changed her relationship with Ms Dalas.

[215]

It can be difficult for a plaintiff to put on evidence of actual harm to reputation, where the only people a plaintiff has access to will often be those who have not believed the defamatory allegations.
As Ms Dalas was defamed in a sector of her reputation where she was not doing paid work, she cannot point to financial loss to support her claim for serious harm. She was defamed in a particular community, but it was not a physical community in which she lived and worked, so she could point to evidence of people shunning or avoiding her in real life, as evidence of the damage to her reputation.
I accept her evidence that, after the publications, she received numerous phone calls where she was asked about the video, and asked whether she was depicted in the video. It is likely that, of the people who chose to call her and raise the topic, most entertained doubts that it was her, or had an open mind about whether it was her.
Those who believed it was her and thought less of her as a result would be unlikely to call her about it.
It is likely that those readers of the NSW Facebook page and the APTAGIE website, would have seen the allegations about Ms Dalas' arrest and believed them. The allegations were presented as facts, not as allegations. They were "supported" by multiple pieces of "evidence". This is particularly true of the second Dalas publication which contained two embedded videos and the fifth Dalas publication, which contained the three photographs side by side, the inset screenshot against a photograph of Ms Dalas, and the embedded video.
The video contained in both the second and fifth Dalas publications showed a woman, who is not Ms Dalas, behaving in an erratic and abusive manner. The allegation that this woman was Ms Dalas would have caused harm to Ms Dalas' reputation to anyone who had seen it.
I accept that, although this video might have been generally available through 7News, the reason Ms Dalas received phone calls about the video was, more likely than not, because of the second and fifth Dalas publications in which Mr White said she was the person in the video.
This is because Ms Dalas received calls from people within the guardianship community. The woman in the video bears a resemblance to Ms Dalas - similar age, blonde hair, wears glasses. However, the resemblance is not so obvious or striking that, seeing it on the nightly news would cause someone who knew Ms Dalas to immediately assume it was her, especially as the footage showed a woman in Sydney and Ms Dalas resides in Melbourne.
Ms Christodoulides, who knew Ms Dalas well, immediately recognised that she was not the woman in the video. However, putting the videos and photographs together, showing both the arrested woman and Ms Dalas wearing black clothing, was highly likely to cause a false "recognition" by people who did not know Ms Dalas so well.
I am satisfied that people who did not know Ms Dalas well, and who saw the photographs adjacent to each other, and who were told that they were the same person, would have concluded that Ms Dalas was the person in the video. Even people who had met her, such as Ms O'Keefe and Ms Siciliano, were initially persuaded it was her. The fact that Mr White's publications positively asserted that it was her, and positively asserted that she had lied in court about it, cause me to be confident in my conclusion that most people who saw the second and fifth Dalas publications would have believed that Ms Dalas had been arrested and had lied about it in court.
Those people who saw it and believed the arrested woman was Ms Dalas would be less likely to want her to act as an advocate for them and would harbour negative views about Ms Dalas.
Not everyone who read the publications would have access to Ms Dalas to ask her about the allegations. There would be people who would simply have read and believed the allegations made by Mr White.
I am satisfied that the evidence establishes that there was actual harm to Ms Dalas' reputation.

[216]

At the time of the first Dalas publication in March 2022, the NSW Facebook page had, according to the screenshot annexed to the pleading, 184 members. There were 31 comments on that post, albeit not by 31 different individuals. No likes or shares are recorded on the post, though individual comments have been liked. By September 2022, that membership had grown to 343 members. There were 35 comments on the third Dalas publication and three likes, though many of the comments also attracted likes. The fourth Dalas publication attached to the pleading does not show shares, likes or comments. In November 2022, at the time of the sixth Dalas publication, the membership had dropped slightly to 332 members. There were three likes on that publication and three shares. JS and Mr White appear to be the only people who commented.
The sixth Dalas publication was copied onto a Reddit page called "r/Trustee_n_Guardian" in September 2024. That Reddit thread belonged to "sqgl" which I understand was a pseudonym for JS. As at November 2024, that Reddit thread had 195 members.[100]
The sixth Dalas publication was republished in full on a website called "Workers BushTelegraph" on 26 November 2022, which appears to be a website associated with RP. In June 2024, the sixth Dalas publication was again republished on the Workers BushTelegraph.
The second and fifth publications were published to the APTAGIE website, which does not have "members". Mr White published links to the APTAGIE website on his NSW Facebook page.
On 16 April 2022, JS published a link to the second Dalas publication on the NSW Facebook page. The screenshot of that link shows the NSW Facebook page had 602 members. It is not clear to me when the screenshot was taken and whether the NSW Facebook page had 602 members in April 2022 or at some later date.
In a Twitter thread about the execution of two police officers in Queensland by Gareth Train, JS posted a link to the fifth Dalas publication on his Twitter account on 13 December 2022, with the comment "ABC knowingly promotes a woman connected to similar extremists". The post JS commented on had 147 comments, 580 shares and 1,600 likes.
On Twitter on 5 August 2022, JS posted, in response to a tweet about the Queensland Public Trustee, "It isn't just QLD. ABC have neglected other states" and posted a link to the second Dalas publication. The original tweet had 38 comments, 73 shares and 525 likes.
On 16 December 2022, JS posted a link to the fifth Dalas publication on Twitter under the comment "ABC are not innocent either". This comment had 57 views.
On his Reddit page, r/Trustee_n_Guardian, JS posted, in response to a comment by another poster that the Four Corners' documentary "looked like a big win for Australia", "It wasn't a big win for NSW (Australia's most populous state) which did not even get a mention". He went on "This activist group, AASGAA is mentioned in this review". The words "this review" contained a hyperlink to the second Dalas publication. Another poster asked a further question, to which JS responded, "it is explained in the review". This thread had six "votes" and eleven comments.
In 2022, JS posted the second Dalas publication in a comment to a post on a Reddit thread "r/Australia" which had 2.2 million members. The post to which JS was commenting had 4600 votes and 362 comments. JS posted a link to the second Dalas publication on numerous other occasions on Reddit.
KJ posted a link to the second Dalas publication on their Twitter account on 24 June 2024.
In addition to being published on APTAGIE, a link to the second Dalas publication was posted on the Queensland Facebook page by an anonymous poster in 2024. The Queensland Facebook page had 929 members.
JS posted a link to the second Dalas publication on the Queensland Facebook page in approximately March 2024.
As at November 2024, a link to the second Dalas publication was "pinned" to the landing page for the APTAGIE website.
Ms Dalas and Mr White each relied on expert opinion.
Ahkmed Amin, an IT expert, undertook a number of investigations to determine what keywords were searched during various months after the Dalas publications, and what results would have been obtained. He was able to show results for searches for Ms Dalas' name and AASGAA, as well as other search terms on Google. In April 2022 for example, a search for AASGAA would have brought up the APTAGIE review as the eleventh result. In March 2023, the fourth most common search term that drove visitors to the APTAGIE website was "Christine Dalas".
Amin produced graphs that showed the results for different search terms that had driven traffic to the particular URL, but could not determine individual hits.
There were no more than two hits per month from search terms. However, this does not disclose how many hits there were from following links, or from people who accessed the APTAGIE website in other ways and navigated through it. Nor does it disclose hits from people who used other search terms, not the subject of investigation.
Geoff Campey, a website analytics expert, gave evidence about the visitor numbers to the APTAGIE website. The APTAGIE website utilised a platform called "Thryv". Mr Campey said the platform does not disclose how it calculates or captures statistics, or how it distinguishes between unique and repeat visitors. However, most platforms would identify the internet provider address assigned to an individual user as one unique visitor, even where multiple devices use the same IP address.
He was able to identify sources of traffic to the APTAGIE website, for example, whether it was driven by Google or other search engine searches, or whether traffic had typed in the URL directly to navigate to the page, or had clicked on a link.
Mr Campey said the data disclosed a high number of "bots" on the APTAGIE website. Bots are used for a number of purposes, including building large language models for artificial intelligence systems. Bots might just visit the home page of a website and determine whether it is an active website, or might copy the website, create a list, go through the list to collect information from each page of the website and then move on. A bot will be able to digest all the information of a website in a matter of seconds, and therefore, bot visits will typically be very short. In contrast, a human visitor will take a longer time to digest content and will therefore spend longer on the site.
It was difficult for him to assess the exact details of bot traffic because the data he had access to only gave him the average visit duration. Visits to APTAGIE that came through Facebook, for example, in the period March 2022 to November 2024, totalled 431, and had an average duration of one minute and 20 seconds. This would be a long time for a bot, but a relatively short time for a human. The average duration on the site for people who were driven there through Twitter was 22 seconds. Mr Campey said Twitter visitors tend to click links and quickly move on if the subject matter does not interest them or is not relevant to them. Mr Amin said Twitter is not generally a driver of bot traffic. The average time for people directed to APTAGIE from Google was 6 minutes and 40 seconds.
Mr Campey said there was an unusual amount of "direct" traffic to the website. Most people find a website by doing a search on a search platform such as Google. A high number of direct visits suggests a high number of bots visiting the website. However, it could also indicate a high number of people clicking links and being taken directly to the page or the website, instead of accessing the website through a search engine.
The data he obtained disclosed 5025 site visits to the APTAGIE website, by 4310 unique visitors with an overall average duration on the site of 4 minutes and 1 second. Of those visits, about 25 per cent were from the US, with an average duration of 13 seconds. Mr Campey and Mr Admin both said this relatively short duration suggests either that most of the US traffic was bots, or was from human visitors clicking a link from another site and quickly discovering the content was not relevant and leaving the site.
Mr Campey provided data for the second Dalas publication, which showed there had been 3731 unique page views with an average time on the page of 4 minutes and 22 seconds. Both experts agreed that this was too long for bots, and this indicated human traffic.

[217]

(a) There is no exact data about how many people saw or interacted with each of the Dalas publications;

(b) It is likely that a significant number of bots visited the APTAGIE website and that, in particular, a large percentage of the US traffic was bots;

(c) The unusual number of direct visits to the APTAGIE website suggests a high level of bot activity, but also represents visits from people who went directly to the website by clicking a link. Links to the APTAGIE website were published on Reddit, Twitter, the NSW Facebook page and the QLD Facebook page;

(d) Between 50 per cent and 60 per cent of the traffic to the APTAGIE website was bots. Extrapolating that the same number of bots visited the second Dalas publication, this would mean that between 1493 and 1865 people visited that page. Mr White submits that 15 per cent of traffic was from administrators. Accepting that figure, and assuming that the administrators always visited the second Dalas publication, which seems unlikely, this would reduce the number of unique visitors to the second Dalas publication to between 1269 and 1580;

(e) The "bounce rate" reflects the number of people who left the page almost immediately upon landing on it. The average bounce rate for the APTAGIE website was about 71 per cent. Given the evidence that bots spend only a second or two on a page, it is not clear whether the bounce rate also includes the visits by bots. The bounce rate for the second Dalas review was about 77 per cent. Taking all the figures provided by the data and interpreting them in the most favourable way for Mr White, this means that somewhere between 200 and 300 people visited the second Dalas publication, and spent enough time on it to mean that, after all the bots had visited, the average time spent on the page was more than 4 minutes;

(f) If the bounce rate includes the bot visits, then the number of visitors to the second Dalas publication would be much higher, at around 2500 visits;

(g) There was no data available for the fifth Dalas publication to establish the number of visitors likely to have read that article, other than inference from the number of people who generally interacted with the APTAGIE website. I could infer that some smaller subset of those who interacted with the APTAGIE website read the fifth Dalas publication, and that that number might be a similar number to those who read the second Dalas publication. However, given that links to the fifth Dalas publication were less widely distributed than links to the second Dalas publication, on the balance of probabilities, the number of people who read the fifth Dalas publication was likely to be somewhat lower than the number who read the second Dalas publication;

(h) It is difficult to determine the number of readers of the first, third, fourth and sixth Dalas publications. These were published on the NSW Facebook page which had variable membership over time, ranging from 192 to 622l;

(i) In line with my comments in relation to the White publications on the AASGAA Facebook page, not all members of a Facebook page are active, or would read every post. Not all members who read a post would respond to it. The likes, shares and comments can give an indication, but cannot disclose the actual number. Those who commented are likely to be the more actively engaged members; and

(j) The NSW Facebook page posts would have been read by some number of members, likely in the tens to low hundreds of people, given the varying membership over time, and the likely level of engagement.

[220]

I have already found that the harm caused by multiple publications of the same, or substantially the same matter, can be aggregated.
I do not accept that the quality of the publications was low, because the matter was published to people who already had a view about Ms Dalas that would have been unchanged by any or all of the publications. I accept that some of those members of the NSW Facebook page had negative views about Ms Dalas, such as JS and RP, but there was no evidence that this was the prevailing view. Ms Dalas' evidence was that AASGAA and the NSW Facebook page had about 100 members in common. It is unlikely that members with a negative view about Ms Dalas and AASGAA would have remained members of her organisation.
Nor was there any evidence that those who accessed or read the APTAGIE website were people who would generally have had a negative view about Ms Dalas or were primarily members of the NSW Facebook page. Links to the APTAGIE website were attached to Twitter posts, Reddit posts, other websites and the NSW Facebook page. There is no evidence that readers of the other websites, Twitter and Reddit threads had any negative view about Ms Dalas, or AASGAA.
Mr White submitted that, to the extent that any harm was caused by imputations that Ms Dalas had been arrested, this was a rumour that had already been circulating in the guardianship community, prior to his publication. He had been instrumental in spreading this rumour, publishing posts, not sued upon, alleging this prior to the first Dalas publication.
I am not satisfied that earlier "rumours" caused damage to Ms Dalas' reputation. Ms Connolly had been provided with the video and podcast before interviewing Ms Dalas, but proceeded with the interview.
Ms Siciliano gave evidence that she saw the second Dalas publication and thought it showed Ms Dalas. She had not previously been aware of those rumours.
Ms Dalas' evidence was that it was after the second Dalas publication that she noticed a significant decline in the number of calls and emails to AASGAA. The Four Corners program aired in March 2022, and for about a month, the enquiries increased in line with expectations. However, after that time, that is, after the time when the second Dalas publication was published, those enquiries declined.
I infer that one of the reasons for the decline was likely because some number of people had read the second Dalas publication and decided against making enquiries of AASGAA.
It is inherently likely that, after the Four Corners' episode aired, members of the public would have had a heightened interest in AASGAA and Ms Dalas.
I accept Ms Dalas' evidence that for about six months after the publication of the second Dalas publication, she was asked whether it was her in the video. The video was embedded in that publication. It is inherently unlikely that individuals would have hunted down 7News footage from 31 August 2021 on their own, to compare and contrast with publicly available photographs of Ms Dalas and then contact her to ask whether it was her.
It is far more likely that the second Dalas publication, which embedded the Four Corners and arrest videos, would have prompted those phone calls.
The decline in enquiries following the fifth Dalas publication is also likely to be causally related. The fifth Dalas publication showed a screenshot of the woman arrested on 31 August 2021 side by side with two photographs of Ms Dalas dressed similarly from 14 May 2021, and then another photograph of Ms Dalas labelled "AASGAA's leader" with an inset of the woman being arrested, both of them captured in similar poses with open mouths, looking slightly up.
Understandably, Ms Dalas had witnesses who, despite initial reservations, ultimately did not believe the allegations made about her. However, I can infer that there are others who saw the publications, and in particular the second and fifth Dalas publications, and did believe the arrest imputations.
On the basis of the inherent tendency of the words, the extent of publication and the evidence of witnesses in relation to the arrest imputations, I am satisfied that the arrest imputations, and in particular the second and fifth Dalas publications, caused Ms Dalas serious harm to her reputation.
Accordingly, I find that Ms Dalas has established that she suffered serious harm to her reputation.
If I am wrong that the harm caused by publication of the same, or substantially the same matter, can be aggregated, I am satisfied that the publication of each of the second Dalas publication, and separately the fifth Dalas publication, was sufficient to cause serious harm, having regard to the content of the publication, the extent of publication that I am satisfied has been established and the evidence of Ms Dalas and others about the harm done to Ms Dalas' reputation.

[221]

Until trial, Mr White relied on a defence of truth or justification to the arrest, lying and illegal rally imputations.
Mr White maintained, despite Ms Dalas' denials on oath that she was not the person arrested, that it was her. He maintained that her denials were lies. He obtained an expert opinion to try to support his assertion that the woman in the video and Ms Dalas were the same person. He relied on voice recordings of Ms Dalas and the voice heard on the video of the woman.
He sought, pursuant to subpoena, all documents held by New South Wales Police in relation to Ms Dalas, including any criminal history, as well as the names and addresses of persons arrested or issued infringement notices by New South Wales Police in connection with a protest rally on 31 August 2021. On 15 December 2023, New South Wales Police produced documents relating to three women arrested at the protest rally. None of them were Ms Dalas. No documents were produced in relation to Ms Dalas.
Despite obtaining those documents in late 2023, he maintained his truth defence until trial nearly a year later. At trial, he wisely did not press this defence.
The photographs of the arrested woman and Ms Dalas do bear a resemblance at first glance. They show two women of similar age, with similar shades and styles of blonde hair, and similar body shapes and sizes. Both women wear glasses. Both are dressed entirely in black.
However, on closer inspection, there are clear differences. The glasses are different: the arrested woman has thick dark frames on her glasses; Ms Dalas' glasses have no, or very thin frames. The hairstyle is different: Ms Dalas has a fringe; the arrested woman does not. The arrested woman's hair is longer. The facial features are not the same. The arrested woman's face is wider, her mouth shape is different, her lips are thinner, and her nose shape is different.
After hearing Ms Dalas give evidence in court and listening to the video of the woman arrested, I concluded that it would be difficult to mistake their voices as the same.
The fact that, in the face of all these obvious differences, Ms Dalas' denial in the Magistrates' Court, and the police documents showing Ms Dalas had not been arrested, Mr White maintained until the very last moment that the arrested woman was Ms Dalas, says much about Mr White's mindset and motivation in this litigation and confirms my earlier findings that Mr White forms conclusions based on his own opinions and not on the evidence.

[227]

Mr White says the publications were published on an occasion of privilege at common law. The purpose of the NSW Facebook page and the APTAGIE website was to provide information about matters relating to Public Trustees. Individuals who accessed those sites had an interest in obtaining information about Public Trustees. Ms Dalas was a public figure in the guardianship and trustee space. Recipients of the publications had an interest in receiving information about her.
Further, Mr White said he was responding to attacks made by Ms Dalas against him, calling him a predator and a troll. His response was germane to the occasion as it set out his concerns about her conduct as a representative of the guardianship movement, in response to those attacks. There was no evidence that Mr White was motivated by malice.
I do not accept those submissions. Recipients of the publications had an interest in guardianship and trustee matters and an interest in receiving information about a representative of the movement.
However, there was no duty or obligation on Mr White to publish false allegations that Ms Dalas had been arrested, had organised the rally at which she had been arrested or had lied about it. Nor could there be any corresponding interest in recipients receiving a false statement of fact that a representative, Ms Dalas, had been arrested.
The publications were not a reply to attack. The Dalas publications were published between March 2022 and November 2022. The "attack" to which Mr White claims to be responding occurred in November 2020 and May 2021. Mr White had repeatedly responded to the perceived attack by Ms Dalas in numerous publications over the years. The privileged occasion, if it existed, does not continue indefinitely. In any event, I am satisfied that Mr White attacked Ms Dalas and that her publications were a reply to this attack. This would render any publication of Mr White's a riposte that does not attract the privilege.
Finally, even if I were satisfied that there was an occasion of privilege that warranted the publication by Mr White, and that his publication was germane to the occasion, the defence would be defeated because I am satisfied that Mr White was motivated by malice.
I make this finding for the following reasons:

[230]

The purposes of an award of damages are to provide consolation for hurt to feelings, compensation for damage to reputation, and vindication of the plaintiff's reputation.
The damages ought to reflect the high value which the law places upon reputation.
The extent of publication, including the likely grapevine effect, and the seriousness of the defamatory sting, are pertinent considerations.
Injury to feelings may constitute a significant part of the harm sustained by a plaintiff, and for which a plaintiff is to be compensated by damages. Injured feelings include the hurt, anxiety, loss of self-esteem, sense of indignity and the sense of outrage felt by the plaintiff.
Aggravated damages are a form of compensatory damages and, where appropriate, form part of the general damages awarded to a successful plaintiff for non-economic loss, designed to reflect aggravation caused to a plaintiff's hurt or injury by reason of some conduct of the defendant.
I have found that the publications did cause serious harm to Ms Dalas' reputation within the trustee and guardianship community. This is the community in which she has built a reputation for advocacy and for assisting the disabled, the elderly and the vulnerable.
I have no doubt that many, perhaps most, within the community continue to hold a positive view about Ms Dalas. The fact that she has been able to continue her advocacy work is a testament to that.
However, the exact impact of the publications on her reputation is unknown and unknowable. There are those who, despite this decision, will continue to believe the defamatory imputations spread by Mr White, because they are imputations that play into the polarisation and divisions that developed during the COVID pandemic.
Ms Dalas impressed as a straightforward witness who gave truthful evidence and did her best to assist the Court. She did not exaggerate her evidence and did not try to bolster her claim. She made admissions against interest. I have no hesitation in accepting her evidence as reliable.
I accept Ms Dalas' evidence about the impact of these publications on her. She sued only on a selection of publications Mr White published about her. As far back as 2020, he had made allegations about her. She said she turned the other cheek at that time.
However, the posts did not abate and she eventually took out an intervention order because she felt so harried and harassed. She felt that his posts were causing others to make increasingly aggressive comments about her. One commenter, ME, suggested he would "do my thing ripping into these AASGAAHOlics or whatever these fools call themselves", to which JS responded, "a delicate approach is needed, as much as a blunt one is desired".[101] Ms Dalas said she felt threatened by three men, Mr White, JS and ME, talking about her, discussing criminal organisations and a "blunt" approach, which she took to mean blunt force.
I accept her evidence that the harm the publications caused her was aggravated by the fact that the publications were in breach of the intervention order. Every time she was informed that Mr White had published something about her, she reported the breach, but nothing seemed to stop Mr White from continuing to post. Indeed, he made references in his posts to the fact of the intervention order. He scoffed at the idea that she could possibly feel threatened by him and persistently denied engaging in stalking or harassment, despite the fact that he was in breach of an order by posting.
Ms Dalas said she felt that the intervention order was not working to stop the ongoing harassment. She said she had done everything she could to try to remove the publications. She contacted Google and Facebook, she tried the eSafety Commissioner, she contacted police, and she had been "in and out" of the Magistrates' Court seeking removal orders. She has had more than 28 court appearances..
She obtained an order that Mr White had to remove the publications, but he did not comply and did not stop posting.
In the end, she felt that issuing defamation proceedings might be the only way to stop him. She issued her proceedings after he had already issued his proceedings against her. He continued to publish posts about both the intervention order and the defamation proceedings.
I can well appreciate that, in light of Mr White's blatant disregard for the terms of the intervention order, she would have felt she had few options available. Even criminal charges in relation to the breach of the intervention order did not convince Mr White to comply with the orders. It was not until after his conviction on a charge of using a carriage service to menace and harass, to which he pleaded guilty, that he removed the fifth Dalas publication. That occurred only the day before this trial commenced.
In all, Mr White published more than seventy publications about Ms Dalas and AASGAA. He removed her name but seems unable or unwilling to accept that referring to her as "AASGAA's leader" and posting her photograph still identifies her and breaches the terms of the intervention order. Mr White is an intelligent man. He well understood the terms of the order and the repercussions of his actions. He said he was a champion of the women's movement. If that is correct, he should understand the impact of his conduct on Ms Dalas. He was motivated by his extreme resentment and dislike of Ms Dalas, and giving vent to that dislike and resentment was more important than complying with the law.
Ms Dalas said that staying silent and turning the other cheek was causing her more damage, and that she needed to restore her credibility within the guardianship community. She said the seriousness of the allegations made about her has made it difficult when dealing with other advocates and the media, as well as victims.
She said she had tried to minimise the damage done by Mr White, but she is "damned if I do and damned if I don't". If she stays silent, she allows his allegations to go unanswered. If she speaks out, she risks amplifying those allegations herself.
This is a case where it is particularly important to "nail the lie". Ms Dalas is a person who has worked to build a community devoted to helping people navigate difficult situations. To be associated with a serious imputation that she was arrested for criminal offences, in circumstances where many within her community would consider she was exposing the most vulnerable to risk, is damaging. There is absolutely no truth to it.
Mr White has also built a community to help the vulnerable. It is deeply regrettable that so much of his energy and time has been spent writing lengthy posts excoriating AASGAA and Ms Dalas, initiating legal proceedings against Ms Dalas, and engaging private investigators to investigate Ms Dalas and others. His energies would be much better directed towards the issues his advocacy group was set up to deal with in New South Wales.
Each case turns on its own facts and circumstances, and awards of damages in one case are not readily comparable in another.
I am satisfied that Ms Dalas has suffered serious harm to her reputation, which must be recognised by an appropriate award of damages. I accept that the harm caused by the publications has taken a significant personal toll on her for which she is entitled to compensatory damages. The publications upon which she has succeeded have caused her stress, anxiety and embarrassment. Attempts to protect her reputation without litigation, by seeking the removal of the posts and restraining Mr White from further publication, have been unsuccessful.
I consider the appropriate award of damages in this case to be $90,000.

At a glance

Court

Decision date

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Judgment (281 paragraphs)

Cases Cited (48)