Re: Bullying Owner Trying to Get in Committee

@JimmyT said:
You have to differentiate not attending mediation and not attending the tribunal.

The former is not compulsory and you would be entitled to write to Fair Trading and say you were not attending because the complainant was using Fair Trading as a form of harassment by wasting committee time (listing all the previous failed cases).

That is correct. This has been the line that we have taken. Everytime we get a request, we notify DoFT that we do not wish to attend. Its just time consuming and more admin for everybody to deal with. As far as I’m aware, DoFT is purely an attempt at “mediation”. Nothing is legally binding.

@JimmyT said:

For the Tribunal, I would be tempted to hire a lawyer to defend your position while making it clear before the hearing that you
a) would be demanding costs from the litigant and
b) would seek to have him declared a vexatious litigant by the Tribunal  

For the tribunal, I understand that decisions are legally binding so we actually have to attend to defend ourselves. We actually have already hired lawyers for this. The executives don’t have enough time to deal with it and also don’t want to risk stuffing up the argument/defense so prefer to have everything properly documented by professionals that should know what they are doing. Its just absurd that to apply to NCAT to initiate a case it costs something like $100 but to defend it will rack up thousands of dollars in legal fees.

Having said that, I’m not completely sure it is within NCATs jurisdiction to be able to declare someone as vexatious but I will definitely bring that up at our meetings. It never hurts to try.

Thanks for your help! Very useful posts and much appreciated