This may seem a bit extreme but I think verbal abuse – spoken or in writing – is considered an assault when you apply for an Apprehended Violence Order. However I believe that this would only be a legitimate avenue if the individual members of the EC applied for the AVO.
It may be worth asking a lawyer if your neighbours can be ordered to cease and desist their harrassment campaigns and that they be ordered not to speak at Executive Committee meetings unless they are invited to do so by the Executive Committee (as prescribed in the strata Act, see below).
If you get a court order against them and they continue their behaviour, they are breaking the law (contempt of court) and the police can be involved.
You might also be able to get an order forbidding them from using letters and other material owned by the Owners Corp – that’s all the owners collectively – for their own personal use.
I’m instinctively against censoring or silencing alternative voices, regardless of how annoying they are, but it’s hard to prove where freedom of speech becomes a licence to abuse. In cases where this is clearly mischievous and causing serious distress while interrupting the smooth running of the building then it may be a matter of compiling the evidence and gathering statutory declarations to show that this behaviour has gone beyond acceptable ‘energetic’ discussion of the issues of the day.
When someone is sending owners material which shows they have been discussed in uncomplimentary terms, all you can do is accept that, yes, as part of the running of the building, people sometimes disagree and there are two sides to every story. If what has been said, or more significantly, written in “private” is defamatory, then you have a whole other issue to deal with because there is no such thing as private correspondence in an EC.
To paraphrase a lawyer friend, the only time you can keep EC correspondence secret from owners is when there is an issue of “commercial in confidence around contracts or when the EC is involved in a legal battle with an owner and it would be to the majority of owners’ disadvantage if all correspondence was available to the other party. But, as an Owners Corporation Network seminar was told recently even then you are on shaky ground, legally.
By the way, if the disgruntled owners are disrupting EC meetings, you could issue them with a Notice To Comply* with Schedule 3, Part 2, Paragraph 14 of the strata Act which says:
14 Owners’ attendance at executive committee meetings
An owner … is entitled to attend a meeting of the executive committee but may not address the meeting unless authorised by resolution of the executive committee.
If they turn up and disrupt a meeting after they have received an NTC, you can run them along to the CTTT and ask it to impose a fine of up to $550.
*I’ve since been told that, since you can only issue Notices to Comply with by-laws (not the law) you have to first pass a by-law agreeing that owners will conduct themselves at meetings subject to the appropriate section of the strata Act.