The serious harm element under the Model Defamation Amendment Provisions requires more than merely non-trivial harm to reputation; the distinction between trivial and serious is not binary. Where a defamatory publication does not identify the plaintiff by name, the plaintiff bears the onus of proving by evidence the scope of publication to persons who understood the material to refer to them, and the gravity of the imputations alone is insufficient. The test for departing from a decision of an intermediate appellate court of another jurisdiction on the same provision is whether there are 'compelling reasons' to do so. The competing approaches to construing 'serious' (spectrum vs plain meaning) remain unresolved, with the ACTCA expressing sympathy for the Basten AJA approach but declining to hold the Rader majority wrong.
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