By Lyle Shelton
Next Wednesday, May 20, I will again be back in the Queensland Supreme Court after the drag queens suing me filed a Section 14 application attempting to strike out my judicial review case before I can even make any arguments.
After more than six years of legal proceedings over my criticism of “Drag Queen Story Time” events for children, the case has become a stark lesson in how anti-vilification laws are being weaponised against Australians who express mainstream views on gender ideology and the protection of children.
That is one of the key reasons I am running for the New South Wales Legislative Council at the next state election.
While I was sued in Queensland when I lived there in 2020, similar anti-free speech laws exist here in NSW. Indeed, these laws have been extended in recent years in response to antisemitism in a way that will clamp down on legitimate speech even more.
If elected, I intend to fight for reforms that protect Australians from being dragged through years of costly legal warfare simply because someone claims to have been offended or hurt by political commentary.
I am deeply grateful for the outstanding work of my legal team at the Human Rights Law Alliance. Without them, defending myself against this relentless litigation would have been impossible.
But the truth is this problem cannot ultimately be solved by good lawyers alone.
The real solution is for parliaments to repeal or radically reform laws that allow activist complainants to weaponise subjective hurt feelings in order to punish political opponents.
Australians are increasingly discovering that the punishment is the process itself.
Even when people eventually win, they can still lose years of their lives, enormous financial resources and emotional energy defending basic freedoms that previous generations simply took for granted.
The original 2023 QCAT ruling found my comments did not amount to unlawful vilification. The drag queens appealed to another member of QCAT and re-ran their case in 2024. Then in late 2025, the QCAT Appeal Tribunal overturned key parts of that decision deciding that my speech was capable of inciting hatred, serious contempt or severe ridicule of the drag queens. Reading the decision, I saw that the Tribunal set a very low bar for what constitutes hate speech that will have serious implications for all Australians. This prompted my judicial review application to the Supreme Court.
My judicial review application argues the Appeal Tribunal adopted the wrong legal test and expanded Queensland’s anti-vilification laws beyond what Parliament intended in a way that is fundamentally out of step with precedents set in other courts and in other States.
This should concern every Australian, regardless of where they stand politically.
If criticising drag queens as being unsafe to perform for children in public libraries can trigger six years of litigation, then nobody engaged in public debate is truly safe.
The drag queens are also asking the Court to require me to pay their costs of participating in the appeal because Supreme Court proceedings operate within a normal court costs jurisdiction. This despite the fact that the Drag Queen’s lawyers are government funded and I have had to crowdfund over many years to defend this case.
That underlines how serious this case has become. But their fears of paying costs could be allayed tomorrow if they dropped their legal action against me.
Instead of dragging me through the courts, we could hire a hall and have a civil debate about the merits of exposing children to sexualised and gender fluid role models.
What began as a blog about children and gender ideology has evolved into a major test case about freedom of communication about important societal issues within Australia.
Australians should be free to peacefully express views on contested moral and political issues without fearing years of legal harassment.
That is why I am taking this fight from the courtroom into the political arena.
If we want to restore genuine freedom of speech in Australia, we need more than legal defences after the damage is done.
We need lawmakers with the courage to repeal the bad laws that make these cases possible in the first place.
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