Andrew L. Urban.
It’s a joke, allright. And the Federal court is the butt of the joke. That was my thought as Sall Grover, to a standing ovation, received her Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) Freedom & Hope Award on Saturday from past recipient Senator Jacinta Nampajimpa Price.
The Federal Court’s decision is defensible in principle as an application of anti-discrimination law, but it is open to legitimate criticism concerning the boundary between punishing discriminatory conduct and penalising a person’s spontaneous emotional reaction. The crucial distinction is between a court imposing a fine for involuntary laughter and a court considering laughter as one element of the harm suffered by a successful discrimination claimant.
Giggle for Girls app creator Sall Grover was not simply fined for an involuntary giggle. In the original proceedings, the Federal Court considered her laughter at a demeaning caricature of Roxanne Tickle when assessing damages. The court did not impose a separate fine for that reaction.
That distinction matters legally, morally and for freedom of expression.
Original judgment — 23 August 2024
Justice Bromwich found indirect discrimination and awarded $10,000 in compensation. He treated the laughter at the caricature as a limited aggravating factor within the overall award, not as a separate fine.
Appeal — 15 May 2026
The Full Court dismissed Grover and Giggle’s appeal, allowed Tickle’s cross-appeal, found direct discrimination in the exclusion and refusal to readmit her, and increased total compensation to $20,000. That sum comprised $12,000 in general damages and $8,000 in aggravated damages.
The strongest defensible criticism of the decision is not that a court must disregard offensive laughter. It is that courts must be careful not to convert ambiguous human behaviour into proof of culpable intent without sufficient contextual support, or to use compensatory damages as a vehicle for moral punishment.
The decision, in my view, could tend to bring the court or the law into disrepute, even if the underlying judgment is legally defensible. But the reason matters: the danger is not simply that a court reached a controversial decision. It is that the public might reasonably perceive the law as punishing an involuntary or ambiguous human reaction, or as requiring people to display prescribed emotions towards a litigant.
The concern is not that laughter is beyond judicial scrutiny. It is that the law should distinguish carefully between:
- an involuntary reaction;
- a deliberate act of ridicule;
- conduct that actually aggravates another person’s injury.
Those are materially different things. Treating them as interchangeable would be a failure of ordinary evidentiary reasoning. In this case, the trial judge characterised Grover’s explanation as disingenuous, and the appellate court left that assessment undisturbed. (Grover’s supporters, however, are very disturbed.)
That is relevant evidence against the proposition that the court simply punished an acknowledged involuntary reflex. Nevertheless, reasonable observers can question whether the distinction between observed behaviour and inferred intention was sufficiently robust.
The bottom line: A court risks damaging its legitimacy if people perceive it to be enforcing an approved moral attitude rather than applying a neutral legal rule.
This concern is especially acute where the dispute involves contested questions of sex, gender identity and the meaning of womanhood. A person may hold a position that a court rejects without thereby acting dishonestly or deserving financial punishment for the position itself.
There is an ordinary, intuitive objection to punishing laughter: people do not always control their reactions, and a laugh does not necessarily signify contempt.
But the real bottom line is that current law fails to protect women’s rights and compels courts to concur with lies about biological reality. Grover has sworn never to stop fighting to correct that. She has an army of supporters who have already put in their dollars to help fund the fight to prove it.
CPAC 2026 was held in Brisbane on October 10 & 11, 2026 and live streamed for members; other than Grover and Price, speakers (inspiration, aspiration, motivation) included former UK Prime Minister Liz Truss, Warren Mundine (CPAC President), Angus Taylor, Senator Pauline Hanson, Senator Matt Canavan, Barnaby Joyce, Senator Bridget McKenzie, Phillip Thompson OAM, Michael Shellenberger, Daniel Wild, Gideon Rozner, Gary Hardgrave, Senator Sean Bell, Ross Cameron, Dan Tehan, Senator Sarah Henderson, Mia Schlicht, Scott Hargreaves, Ian Plimer, Robert Gregory & Suzi Smeed and Andrew Cooper (CPAC National Director). The one thing everyone agreed on was the need to oust the current Albanese Labor government, regarded as the worst and most socialist in Australian history.