One Punch at 23, and 13 Years Later His Real Estate Licence Is Gone?

A CPD class turned into a live legal research exercise

Today I was teaching CPD at a real estate office.

One part of the session was about a skill I think property professionals genuinely need:

When a legal issue comes up, how do you find the Act, locate the right section, read the definition, and work out whether the newspaper headline, a colleague or even a regulator's summary actually answers the question?

A current Queensland real estate case happened to be a perfect teaching example.

So I opened the article in class and said:

“Let’s look it up now.”

I had not prepared a neat answer the night before and simply come in to recite it.

We worked through it live.

What exactly did the article say?

Where did the five-year rule come from?

What does “serious offence” actually mean?

Is a two-year sentence the same thing as a statutory maximum penalty?

Does the Office of Fair Trading have a discretion to cancel the licence, or does the Act itself produce that result?

And if he did not have a conviction when he originally applied for his licence, would answering “No” on the application necessarily have been wrong?

The deeper we went, the more interesting the case became.

He was not a junior agent

One of the students pointed out something important:

“Teacher Shih, this is not just some agent in the paper. He is the Principal of McGrath Bulimba.”

I checked it afterwards, and they were right.

Tony O’Doherty is the Principal of McGrath Bulimba.

McGrath announced in 2024 that Tony and business partner Jon Iceton had joined the group and that their Bulimba business would become McGrath Bulimba. Tony later also took an ownership stake across a number of McGrath offices in Brisbane.

McGrath's own public material says that before joining the group he had already built a substantial real estate career. At Belle Property he was Queensland Top Principal from 2020 to 2024, and his FY24 sales exceeded $208 million.

So this is not a story about someone who made a mistake as a young man and then never built a professional life.

Quite the opposite.

On the public record, he went on to build a very successful Brisbane real estate career and become a Principal.

And now his Queensland real estate licence has run into trouble because of something that happened more than a decade ago.

The story goes back to Ireland in 2013

Tony was 23 at the time.

According to the later court reporting, he was involved in an altercation outside a nightclub in Limerick and punched another man.

The man fell backwards and suffered serious head injuries, including a fractured skull and bleeding on the brain.

To be clear:

Violence is violence.

There is no need to excuse the conduct itself.

What makes the licensing issue unusual is the timing.

The incident happened in:

2013.

But the conviction did not come until:

2025.

So the underlying conduct was more than a decade old, while the conviction was recent.

That is where Queensland licensing law comes crashing into the story.

Section 34: where the five-year rule comes from

The first provision we opened in class was section 34 of the Property Occupations Act 2014.

Section 34(1)(b) says an individual is not a suitable person to hold a licence if the person has been convicted, in Queensland or elsewhere, within the preceding five years of a serious offence.

Section 34(2) then says that an individual who is not a suitable person cannot hold a licence.

That is where the five-year point in the media coverage comes from.

And it creates a strange timing problem.

Imagine the same conduct had occurred in 2013 and the conviction had been entered in 2014.

The five-year period would be long gone by now.

But because Tony's conviction did not occur until 2025, the matter is now inside that five-year window.

In other words, for this statutory test, the relevant issue is not only when the conduct happened, but also when the person was convicted.

That is the part that makes many people look at the case and think the result feels unusually harsh.

Section 77: the tougher provision

Then we kept reading.

And section 34 may not even be the most difficult provision for him.

For someone who already holds a licence, the more direct provision is section 77.

Its heading is Immediate cancellation.

If a licensee is convicted of a serious offence, the Act does not say the licence may be cancelled.

It says the licence is cancelled.

That wording matters.

I stopped the class there and asked everyone to look at it.

“May” and “is” are not the same thing in legislation.

If a statute says “may”, the next question is often how a regulator should exercise a discretion and what factors should be weighed.

But where the Act itself says the licence is cancelled when a specified event occurs, a different question comes first:

How much room does the Office of Fair Trading actually have to say, “Yes, this happened, but he has had a good record for the last 13 years, so we will let him keep the licence”?

That is why points such as his age at the time, the years that have passed and his subsequent professional record may be highly persuasive as matters of fairness and policy, but they may not be the first legal question under section 77.

The first question is more technical:

Does the conviction actually meet the Act's definition of a serious offence?

A serious offence is not determined by the sentence he actually received

That takes us to the statutory definition.

The Property Occupations Act has its own definition of serious offence.

It includes offences involving the use or threatened use of violence, where the offence is punishable by three or more years' imprisonment.

This is another point that is very easy to misunderstand from a newspaper article.

Tony was reportedly sentenced to two years' imprisonment, fully suspended.

Someone might immediately say:

“Two years? Then it is under three years.”

But that mixes up two different legal concepts.

The Act is not asking what sentence this particular offender actually received.

It is asking about the statutory maximum penalty for the offence.

Actual sentence and maximum penalty are not the same thing.

So a newspaper report that says he received two years does not, by itself, answer the Queensland serious-offence question.

You still need to identify the Irish offence and check the maximum penalty attached to it.

That was a very good teaching moment in class.

Change one legal concept, and the conclusion can change completely.

Did he answer his original licence application incorrectly?

Then one of the students asked another good question:

“But the incident happened in 2013. If he later applied for a Queensland real estate licence and answered No to a criminal-history question, wasn't that misleading the Office of Fair Trading?”

So we kept going and opened the current Form 1-1 — Application for an individual’s licence used in Queensland.

The current Form 1-1 remains the Queensland Government's paper application form for an individual property licence.

Its suitability questions focus on matters including whether an applicant has been found guilty or convicted within relevant periods, and whether licences have previously been refused, suspended or cancelled.

Now take the clock back to a point when Tony was 23, the incident had occurred, but he had not yet been found guilty or convicted.

If you handed him today's Form 1-1 at that point, then on the relevant guilty-or-conviction question, answering:

No

appears entirely capable of being the correct answer.

That is important.

It is not an excuse for the conduct.

It is simply recognising that legal events happen at different times.

An incident occurring,

being investigated,

being charged,

being found guilty,

and being convicted

are not all the same legal event.

We cannot use what we know happened in 2025 and automatically project it backwards to say:

“Therefore you must have lied on an application years earlier.”

That is hindsight doing the legal reasoning for us.

There is still an important qualification.

We do not have Tony's original licence application in front of us, we do not know precisely which version of the form he completed, and we do not know whether the Office of Fair Trading separately requested any other information from him at the time.

So I would not jump from this to saying his entire original application definitely had no disclosure issue.

But equally, without evidence, I would not jump to the opposite conclusion and say he must have deceived OFT.

Law cannot use today's answer to rewrite yesterday's facts

This was probably my favourite part of the class discussion.

The natural reaction is:

“The incident happened in 2013. How could he later say No?”

But the legal questions should be:

What exactly did the form ask?

Then:

What was legally true on the day he completed it?

Not:

What do we know today?

If the form asks about being found guilty or convicted, you look at the applicant's status on the date of the application.

If there was no finding of guilt and no conviction at that time, then the answer to that particular question is No.

That is not exploiting a loophole.

That is answering the question that was actually asked.

If the licence is cancelled, can't he simply reapply?

Naturally, the next question from the room was:

“If the licence has been cancelled, why doesn't he just apply again?”

And that takes us straight back to section 34.

If the 2025 Irish conviction is ultimately a serious offence for the purposes of the Queensland Act, then during the five years following that conviction section 34 says he is not a suitable person to hold a licence.

Section 34(2) says such a person cannot hold a licence.

So during that five-year period, the issue may not simply be whether OFT thinks he has had an otherwise excellent 13-year record and deserves another chance.

The legislation has already drawn a line.

In other words:

It may not be about whether OFT wants to give him a licence.

It may be about whether the Act allows OFT to give him one during that period.

What happens after five years?

That creates another easy misunderstanding.

Does everything disappear once the five years expire?

No.

After five years, the particular statutory barrier in section 34(1)(b) would no longer apply simply because the conviction was “within the preceding five years”.

But that does not mean a later suitability assessment must pretend the history never happened.

A person's criminal history,

a previous licence cancellation,

character,

subsequent conduct,

and ability to perform the activities of a licensee

may still be relevant to a broader suitability assessment.

So the better way to understand it is:

Within five years, there may be a direct statutory barrier.

After five years, the matter is more likely to move into the broader suitability assessment.

Five years passing is not the same thing as the slate being wiped clean.

What I really wanted the class to learn was not whether Tony will win

I do not know how Tony's appeal will ultimately end.

And while that process is still running, I have no interest in pretending to be the court, OFT or his lawyer.

What I do know is that the case made an excellent CPD lesson.

If you only read the newspaper, you might leave with one line in your head:

“A serious offence within five years means no licence.”

But when we worked through the issue live, we had to find:

section 34;

section 77;

the definition of serious offence;

the difference between actual sentence and maximum penalty;

the current Form 1-1;

and the exact legal position at the time an earlier application may have been made.

Every extra layer made the answer more precise.

That is why I increasingly dislike CPD that is just about sitting in a room and memorising today's answer.

If I tell you what section 34 means today and the law changes next year, you may be lost again.

A more useful skill is knowing what to do when the next question arrives.

Ask:

Which section?

Then:

Where is the definition?

Then:

What does the form actually ask?

Then:

Are we talking about conduct, a charge, a finding of guilt, or a conviction?

Only then should we reach a conclusion.

Property professionals do not need to memorise every provision better than a lawyer.

But when a newspaper, a client, a colleague or anyone else says:

“The law says this.”

You should be able to open the Act and reply:

“Which section? Let’s look at it.”

And one final reminder:

Words are cheaper than punches.

A moment of anger can feel like it is over in seconds, while the consequences may not arrive until years later.

Sometimes the bill for a punch is sent a very long time after the punch itself.