Lawyers for John Barilaro will launch a “wholesale attack” on the defence filed by the YouTube comedian Jordan Shanks in his defamation battle against the New South Wales deputy premier, saying there is “barely a paragraph” of the document that will “survive” their challenge.
Friday was the first case management hearing for Barilaro’s defamation case against Shanks, a former male model and YouTuber who uses the nom de plume Friendlyjordies, over two videos the deputy premier claims are “vile and racist” and brought him into “public disrepute, odium, ridicule and contempt”.
Barilaro alleges the videos, published in September and October last year, carried the imputation that he was a “corrupt conman”, committed perjury nine times, corruptly gave $3.3m to a beef company and corruptly voted against a royal commission into water theft.
Shanks has filed a truth defence over some of the imputations, including that Barilaro is a “corrupt conman” and that he committed perjury.
On Friday Barilaro’s barrister, Sue Chrysanthou SC, told the court the defence filed by Shanks’s lawyers was “defective” because it failed to explain why the perjury claim is justified.
“We are making a wholesale attack on the defence,” Chrysanthou told the court.
“There’s barely a paragraph that will survive, given the lack of particulars.”
Shanks’s lawyers have argued justified truth over the perjury claims, but the defence document stated issues of parliamentary privilege restricted them from making those arguments. On Friday barrister Matthew Collins QC, for Shanks, sought a further hearing to “flesh out” the questions over privilege.
But Chrysanthou took issue with that, pointing out Shanks had filed his defence late while also failing to provide particulars on the justified truth claim. The document, she said, made “serious allegations in relation to my client” with a “complete failure to provide particulars”.
“He’s accusing a minister of the crown of nine counts of perjury with not one particular,” she said.
She said the “leisurely timetable” proposed by Collins would waste the court’s time while “the videos are still online and not only that but Mr Collins’s client continues to post offensive videos not only about my client but about my instructing solicitor”.
Chrysanthou argued both that Barilaro could not waive parliamentary privilege, and that it was necessary for Shanks to provide particulars of how he would prove the truth of the perjury imputation. She said the request for Barilaro to waive privilege was “bizarre”.
“Why should we take Mr Shanks’s word for it that he has a defence that he can properly particularise?” she said.
Justice Steven Rares set down the next hearing in the matter for 23 July, while Collins committed to providing an outline of particulars before that date.
Collins also flagged that Shanks would seek a jury trial in the case, a rare course of action in the federal court where contempt trials are typically heard by judges alone.
Google is also being sued by Barilaro as the publisher of YouTube, where the videos are hosted, and his lawyers are seeking judicial permission to serve the tech company overseas.
