Quite some years ago now, a lawyer pointed out to me that Australia endures - or enjoys, depending upon where you're coming from - some of the most draconian libel and defamation laws in the world, a legacy of some of the very shady colonial era politicians in NSW and Victoria, who introduced those laws to protect themselves. (I understand that the NSW parliament once had a murderer as Speaker of the House.)
In Australia, he said, the truth is no defence - unless that truth can be proved to a degree acceptable to a court of law.
Not, of course, that I am in any way implying that there could be even a skerrick of truth in these outrageous allegations about our Prime Minister in her "naive young girl" period, which I understand followed her "shy schoolgirl" period.