How a Queensland 'Struggle Session' Improved My Thinking.

A practical guide to the jurisdictional argument that ends the lawfare - because the High Court already handed you the weapon, and nobody told you it was there.

You know the envelope. Tribunal letterhead. Officious font. A complaint from someone you have quite possibly never met, and definitely wouldn’t want to anyway, who has decided that your participation in a public debate about biological reality constitutes vilification and requires the formal intervention of the state to correct. You have been reported. You are being processed. Welcome to the machinery.

Here is what happens if you play their game. Months of paperwork. Legal fees that accumulate with the cheerful indifference of a taxi meter on a traffic-jammed motorway. Sleepless nights. Reputational damage that lingers regardless of outcome. And throughout all of it, the activist who filed the complaint - his name is Adrian Buckley in my case - pays nothing, risks nothing, and is perfectly entitled to do exactly the same thing to you again next month, and the month after, because the system has been designed - whether by intention or by the happy accident of ideological capture - to make the process itself the punishment.

I know this because it happened to me. I said sex is binary and that Adrian Buckley’s conduct as a male constituted dangerous, unethical experimentation on a child and that his desire to put his nipple in the newborn’s mouth was child abuse, to put it mildly, and less mildly, even a reasonable person would consider it paedophilic in nature. I questioned gender identity ideology in a public forum. I participated in a debate that the relevant tribunal apparently considers actionable. The envelope arrived. I opened it. And then, after a period of entirely justified fury, I read the law.

“State tribunals - QCAT, NCAT, VCAT - are not neutral arbiters. They have no costs orders against losing complainants, no rules of evidence, no meaningful gatekeeping. Any complaint is accepted. The Member decides what feels fair, not what the law requires. This is lawfare. The tribunal is the weapon.”

State tribunals - QCAT, NCAT, VCAT, take your pick - are not neutral arbiters applying settled legal principles with dispassionate rigour. They have no costs orders against losing complainants, which means filing a vexatious complaint costs the complainant precisely nothing. They have no rules of evidence worth the name. They have no meaningful gatekeeping mechanism to filter out complaints that have no legal foundation - like mine. Any complaint is accepted. The Member - not a judge, not bound by the conventions that govern actual courts - decides what feels fair, which is a rather different standard from what the law actually requires. This is lawfare. The tribunal is the weapon. The complaint is the ammunition. You are the target.

What they do not want you to know - what I did not know until I sat down and read the cases - is that the High Court has already handed you the argument that ends this. In Burns v Corbett [2018] HCA 15, the High Court held that State tribunals cannot hear matters involving federal jurisdiction. Cannot. Not “may struggle to” or “might find difficult.” Cannot. The implied freedom of political communication - established in Lange v ABC and developed in Coleman v Power - is a federal constitutional matter. The moment your speech engages that freedom, the matter is federal. The tribunal’s jurisdiction is gone. Not diminished. Gone.

Under Citta Hobart [2022] HCA 16, the tribunal cannot weigh your defence. It cannot ask whether your speech was reasonable, proportionate, or expressed with sufficient sensitivity to the feelings of people who disagree with you. It can only ask whether your defence is genuinely raised. That threshold is not high. You meet it the moment you say, plainly and on the record: this is political communication on a matter of public debate. That is a federal matter. You have no jurisdiction over it.

Their power ends there. Dismissal is the only lawful outcome.

Here is what you do, in sequence, without panic and without conceding anything.

1. Download the Stay Safe from Lawfare document linked below. It contains the arguments, the precedents, and the procedural steps in plain language.

2. Personalise it to your matter. This takes less time than you think.

3. File the section 78B Notice. This automatically stays the proceedings. The tribunal cannot proceed while the constitutional question is on foot.

4. File the Jurisdictional Challenge. Serve the Attorneys-General of the Commonwealth and the relevant State. Take a screenshot of the service as proof.

5. When the Member asks whether your speech was offensive, or invites you to explain yourself, say this: “Under Citta Hobart, you are forbidden from assessing my defence. Your jurisdiction is spent. I object to the proceeding continuing.”

6. If they proceed anyway - and some will, because the culture of these bodies runs well ahead of their understanding of their own legal limits - file for prohibition in the Supreme Court. A stay will issue. The activist discovers, at that point, that lawfare has a price after all.

A note about my own case, because I owe you the context. I had certain advantages that you may not. I live interstate from where the complaint was filed, which gave me a natural Burns defence at the threshold. I am, by temperament, not easily frightened, especially not by fetishitic transvestites with a eunuch fantasy. I told them all to fuck off… I also did in legal terms too. Most people are not in that position. Most people feel genuine fear when that envelope lands - fear that is entirely rational, given what the process is designed to do to you, and entirely exploited by the people who file these complaints knowing perfectly well what they are setting in motion.

That is why I built a document. Not as a theoretical exercise. Not as a contribution to academic debate about constitutional law. As a practical tool, for the next person who opens that envelope and feels the ground shift under them. Use it. Pass it on to anyone who needs it. The argument works. The High Court already decided it. Nobody told you because the people running these tribunals would rather you did not know.

Important: Nothing here is legal advice and I am not your lawyer. Have a lawyer review this before you act - preferably one who has read Burns v Corbett and is not instinctively deferential to tribunals. But go in with your eyes open. These bodies are not neutral. They are not designed to be neutral. Know what you are walking into, and know that you have more ground to stand on than they want you to believe.

Download the Stay Safe from Lawfare document: [Link]

Just to be very clear and to reassure anyone reading this who doesn’t know me - I am selling nothing. I am giving freely to try and help others. That’s how we win - by sharing what we learn.

Pass it on. They are counting on your fear. Disappoint them.