‘Gobbledygook’: Qld court tosses out man’s laughable appeal over driving charge

A man made a laughable argument in a bid to have his unlicensed driving charge dismissed. But the state’s highest court wasn’t having a bar of it.

A self-proclaimed sovereign citizen has been excoriated by Queensland’s highest court after claiming the state laws do not apply to him.

Ross James Bradley took his charge of unlicensed driving to Queensland’s Court of Appeal in the hope it would be thrown out.

But it only took the first two lines of his application for the justices to dismiss it as “a jumble of gobbledygook” and nonsensical arguments.

Mr Bradley’s first two sentences, revealed in the court’s decision that was published on Tuesday, were as follows:

“My BRADLEY person (conjoined with the BRADLEY ‘spiritual’ family body-politic) is my own “body politic” by succession, at Law. It is my natural body incorporated at the supreme Christian Law and is my own jurisdiction.”

Mr Bradley was initially fined $150 with no conviction recorded for his single charge of unlicensed driving.

He applied to a magistrate to dismiss the charge for “reasons that are not clear” that a police officer had no power to charge him.

“The argument was obvious nonsense and the magistrate rightly rejected it,” Justice Walter Sofronoff said in the Court of Appeal’s judgment.

Not satisfied, Mr Bradley applied to the District Court and argued he was a “citizen sovereign” and that the laws of Queensland did not apply to him.

Justice Sofronoff said he was puzzled by Mr Bradley’s claim.

“If that was true, then it would be hard to understand why the applicant was agitating his complaints before this court, which is one that has been established under the laws that he says do not apply to him,” Justice Sofronoff said.

“This paradox did not trouble the applicant.

“That the applicant is merely persisting in putting forward a jumble of gobbledygook to support his application in this court can be seen at once if one reads only the two opening sentences of his purported outline of argument.”

The US-based Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC) lists the sovereign citizen movement as an extremist organisation.

“Sovereign citizens believe that they – not judges, juries, law enforcement or elected officials – get to decide which laws to obey and which to ignore, and they don’t think they should have to pay taxes,” the centre said.

According to the SPLC, the movement is based on a decades-old conspiracy theory about a “common law” legal system and is rooted in racism and anti-Semitism.

The movement has garnered notoriety in Australia in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

In August, Victoria’s Chief Police Commissioner Shane Patton revealed some citizens were employing the tactics used by the sovereign citizen movement to avoid adhering to the chief health officer’s guidelines.