01What the owner actually did

This section matters more than the legal analysis, because this is the part a reader can avoid repeating.

He had genuine complaints, and he raised them properly first. In 2022 he engaged Singh Homes Pty Ltd to build a new house at Truganina, in Melbourne’s west. Construction started in late April 2023. The parties fell into dispute over matters including the timeliness of his payments and his concerns about the quality of the work. He raised those concerns by email in July 2023.

What he was complaining about. The judgment reproduces both publications, and his grievances are recognisable to anyone who has had a build go wrong. He said he had paid a deposit almost two years earlier on land that was already titled, for a single-storey house, and that the permit did not arrive until 22 March 2023, leaving the build still at fixing stage. In the video he said that from the slab stage onwards he had found faults in everything completed, that he had sent them ‘on [a] daily basis, one by one’ to the supervisors and directors, and that no one listened. He complained of unreturned calls, of variation after variation, and of being pressed for payment by a deadline under threat of cancellation. He said that he was himself a trade person with knowledge, and that people without that knowledge would fare worse.

None of that, in itself, was the problem. The problem was what came next.

He told the builder he would go public, twice. On separate occasions in August 2023, and again from December 2023 to January 2024, he informed Singh Homes that he intended to go public if his concerns were not addressed. A stated intention to publish, made during a commercial dispute, is not a neutral fact when a court later comes to consider why the publication was made.

The contract ended. Singh Homes issued a notice of intention to terminate on 15 December 2023 and formally terminated on 12 February 2024.

Two days later, he posted. On 14 February 2024 he published a post on a Facebook page which, according to the judgment, is named “Dodgy Builders Melbourne”. The judgment reproduces the post in full. Four features of that post did the damage, and none of them are about whether his complaints were true.

Three days after that, the video. On 17 February 2024 he uploaded a video to TikTok, speaking to camera in Punjabi. In it he named the company, named its two directors, Mr Sarwara and Mr Anand, and named four supervisors. He urged others not to sign: ‘my brothers and sisters who [are] going to sign contract with them should see this video.’

Then Singh Homes and both directors sued. The company and the two directors sued for misleading and deceptive conduct and injurious falsehood. Mr Sarwara and Mr Anand additionally sued for defamation, in their own names.

The reach. The trial judge noted the TikTok video was viewed about 220,000 times. She found it was also shared within the community via WhatsApp and was likely discussed within the community, and that the overwhelming majority of viewers were likely to be people within the Indian community, in Australia and outside it. That finding is what lawyers call the ‘grapevine effect’, and it is one of the things that turns a post into serious harm.

02What it cost, and how the money was calculated

Most reports of a case like this say ‘he was ordered to pay $673,000’ and stop. The calculation is the useful part, because it shows how a post becomes a number.

Six customers, not twelve. The builder claimed it had lost 12 potential customers and put its loss at $1,089,608.59. The trial judge found some of those assessments ‘overly optimistic’. She ultimately accepted six customers were lost as a result of the conduct.

The loss was a lost chance, valued in two steps. First, the profit the builder would have made on each contract. An accountant employed by Singh Homes gave evidence that the company’s average profit margin across all jobs since 2017 was 23.15 per cent, and applied that to each lost contract. Second, that figure was discounted by the probability the contract would never have been signed anyway. The builder’s closing submissions put that chance between 20 and 95 per cent, and for most of the contracts at 60 per cent.

She also granted an injunction restraining him from publishing material to the same effect, and ordered him to take all reasonable steps to remove the publications from the internet.

And the defamation claims were dismissed, at that point. The trial judge was not persuaded the harm the directors alleged amounted to ‘serious harm’. That dismissal is what they cross-appealed, and it is where the case becomes important to everybody else.

03The comments underneath

This is the finding.

The directors ran their case on the basis that the homeowner was the publisher of the comments other people had left under his TikTok video. That argument rests on the High Court’s decision in Fairfax Media Publications Pty Ltd v Voller (2021) 273 CLR 346, the case that held media companies were publishers of third-party comments left on their Facebook posts.

The jury accepted it.

The jury found that the applicant published the third-party comments.

The jury also found those comments carried a specific meaning: that the directors were responsible for the building business going into liquidation.

Here is where it came apart. The trial judge found he had not conveyed that meaning himself, in either the post or the video, and held he was not liable for representations made by others. So when she assessed serious harm, she set that evidence aside, and most of the evidence went to exactly that. As she observed, numerous witnesses gave evidence that they were asked about the video, but that evidence was ‘almost always in relation to whether Singh Homes was going into liquidation’. She treated the builder’s difficulty getting trades the same way.

The Court of Appeal held that was an error.

The judge erred in failing to decide whether that aspect of the applicant’s publications caused serious harm to the reputations of [the directors].

The jury had found he published those comments. It was therefore necessary to take account of the harm they caused. Excluding it was inconsistent with the jury’s own finding.

Once those comments were taken into account, the only real basis for the judge’s finding that the cross-applicants had not proved the serious harm element falls away.

In our opinion, the combined effect of the direct evidence and the above inferential matters comfortably established proof of the serious harm element.

The one-line version: his own post was found not to carry the liquidation meaning. The comments underneath it were. And he was held to have published those too.

04What the law says

Three separate causes of action were run against him, and they work differently. This is a plain summary of what the judgment shows, not legal advice. The elements of each are a matter for a lawyer.

Misleading or deceptive conduct: s 18, Australian Consumer Law

Section 18 only bites on conduct done ‘in trade or commerce’. That was the threshold the whole appeal turned on. The controlling test comes from the High Court in Concrete Constructions (NSW) Pty Ltd v Nelson, quoted in the judgment: conduct ‘which is itself an aspect or element of activities or transactions which, of their nature, bear a trading or commercial character’.

A jury found this homeowner’s posts crossed that line. An appellate court has not decided that they should have. See section 05.

Injurious falsehood: the one that actually held

This is the cause of action almost nobody talks about, and in this case it was decisive. It is a common law tort, not a statute, and it does not have a ‘trade or commerce’ gate. The jury found the conduct amounted to a series of injurious falsehoods. That finding was never appealed.

the jury’s finding about injurious falsehood, which provided a parallel basis upon which damages would have been payable, and an injunction granted, even if the applicant’s conduct was not in trade or commerce

Read that twice. Even if he had won the entire consumer law argument, the damages and the injunction would have stood.

Defamation, and the serious harm element

Defamation was the directors’ personal claim. Since 2021, Victoria and the other states have a threshold element. From the authorised text of the Defamation Act 2005 (Vic):

So the jury decided publication and the judge decided harm. The case came apart precisely on that seam.

How a court decides whether harm is ‘serious’

The Court set out the circumstances from which serious harm may be inferred, adopting the list in Mond v The Age Company Pty Ltd [2025] FCA 442. Paraphrased, they include: the gravity of what was said; how widely it spread and how likely it was to spread further; whether there was a prompt apology and who saw it; the reputation of the person publishing it; the medium, and whether it stays online indefinitely; the existing reputation of the person defamed; who exactly it reached; and the inherent probabilities.

Two of those are worth a homeowner’s attention: whether there was a prompt apology, and whether the material stays online.

05What the Court did not decide

Two things will be reported loosely, and both are wrong. The reasons say so in terms.

It did not decide that posting a bad review breaches consumer law

The Court noted that nobody could point to a case where an ordinary consumer had been held liable under s 18 for a review.

There is no decided case where … a consumer has been found to have contravened s 18 of the ACL by making misleading or deceptive statements in a social media post in the course of reviewing the performance of a company from which they obtained goods or services. Such reviews are, of course, now ubiquitous. But … this case does not provide the occasion for its resolution.

Leave was refused for two reasons that have nothing to do with whether the point is good. First, waiver. The judge circulated her proposed jury directions by email on 13 June 2025. Later that day the homeowner’s lawyer told the court, ‘[w]e are also content with the jury direction’. After the charge, asked whether there were any exceptions, he answered, ‘Thank you, Your Honour’. No redirection was ever sought. Second, futility: the unappealed injurious falsehood finding made the point academic.

It did not lower the bar for serious harm

The directors also argued the trial judge had set the threshold too high by placing serious harm on a scale of seriousness. The Court rejected that argument, following the ACT Court of Appeal in Supaphien v Chaiyabarn [2026] ACTCA 5, and rejected the submission that s 10A excludes only trivial or minor claims.

To the extent that the cross-applicants implicitly submit that the ‘serious harm’ element excludes only trivial or minor defamation claims, we reject that submission

The cross-appeal succeeded on one thing only: evidence that had been left out of account.

06What is still open

The defamation damages are not decided. The Court of Appeal declined to assess them itself, noting the oral argument had been brief and that it was in effect being invited ‘to read the materials and form a sort of unassisted view’. It remitted the assessment to the trial judge, who heard the evidence. The directors had sought ‘at least $100,000 apiece’. Whether they receive that, or anything like it, is now a matter for the County Court.

The Court also recorded that the directors accepted they could not ‘double dip’ on reputational harm already compensated under the consumer law claim.

07If you are in a dispute right now

The order matters.

1. Get legal advice before you publish anything about a live dispute. This is first for a reason. It is also the step this case would have cost the least to take.
2. Document the work before anything changes. Photographs, dates, and a written record of what was raised and when. Once rectification starts, the evidence goes.
3. Get an independent defects report. Not a quote from another builder, but an inspection by someone who does not profit from the rectification. A dated report with photographs and measurements is evidence. It works in a dispute process. A post works on an audience.
4. Use the dispute process. Every state has one, and in Victoria the domestic building dispute process is free to start.
5. Keep the complaint in the channels that carry legal protection: the contract, the dispute scheme, the regulator, the tribunal.

And if you have already posted:

• Do not delete anything before you get advice. There was an injunction and a takedown order in this case, but removal is a legal question with evidentiary consequences, and it is not one to work out from an article.
• Look at the comments underneath. On this judgment, comments left by other people under your post can be treated as published by you.
• A prompt apology is one of the things a court weighs when deciding whether harm is serious. Whether to make one is a question for your lawyer, not for you alone.

You can also check the builder’s registration yourself, in every state, at no cost. And where the work is defective, a Direction to Fix costs the owner nothing. The regulator can order the builder to rectify, and it is an offence for the builder to bill you for complying.

08Sources

Every quotation above is taken from the Court of Appeal’s published reasons and carries the paragraph number, so any reader can check it.

1. Singh v Singh Homes Pty Ltd [2026] VSCA 191

   Supreme Court of Victoria, Court of Appeal. McLeish, Walker and Donaghue JJA, 18 August 2026. Full reasons, 150 paragraphs.
2. Singh Homes Pty Ltd & Ors v Singh [2025] VCC 1740

   County Court of Victoria, Judge Clayton. The judgment appealed from, cited throughout the reasons.
3. Defamation Act 2005 (Vic), s 10A

   Authorised version 006. legislation.vic.gov.au
4. Competition and Consumer Act 2010 (Cth) sch 2 (Australian Consumer Law), s 18

   Operation as described in the reasons at [2] and [26].
5. Concrete Constructions (NSW) Pty Ltd v Nelson (1990) 169 CLR 594

   High Court of Australia. The ‘in trade or commerce’ test.
6. Fairfax Media Publications Pty Ltd v Voller (2021) 273 CLR 346

   High Court of Australia. Publication of third-party comments.
7. Supaphien v Chaiyabarn [2026] ACTCA 5

   ACT Court of Appeal. Followed on the serious harm threshold.
8. Mond v The Age Company Pty Ltd [2025] FCA 442

   Federal Court of Australia. The inference factors adopted at [118].
9. Australian Business Register, ABN 72 138 208 385, Singh Homes Pty Ltd

   Status recorded as active. Checked 22 August 2026. abr.business.gov.au

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