Peter Ansell

Lawyer and Anti‑Corruption Advocate

Peter Ansell is a Victorian lawyer (currently non‑practising) whose career took an unexpected turn when he refused to cooperate with the Victorian Legal Services Board’s (VLSB) efforts to persecute his client, entrepreneur and legal reform advocate Shivesh Kuksal. The retaliation pushed him from conventional legal practice to full‑time anti‑corruption activism.

Peter is a key architect of Rule O’Flaw, an evidence‑driven initiative that exposes systemic misconduct by legal regulators, courts, and related public authorities. By sharing his knowledge and experience, Peter seeks to demonstrate how legal institutions can be quietly repurposed from public guardians into instruments of intimidation and control, and to equip other professionals with tools to recognise and resist those dynamics.

Legal Background and Regulatory Retaliation

Peter has practised as a lawyer in Victoria for about four decades, focusing on advisory work and complex litigation involving government agencies and regulators. He has also served as an officer of a leading Australian blue-chip company.

Approximately three years ago, Peter’s disputes with the VLSB arose directly from his work for Shivesh Kuksal, in circumstances where:

• He had been acting for Shivesh in extant and impending proceedings involving Victoria Police and the VLSB.
• The VLSB was pressuring him to breach client legal privilege to undermine Shivesh’s lawsuits against the VLSB and Victoria Police.
• Peter regarded the VLSB’s conduct as a malicious abuse of authority and commenced legal proceedings in the Supreme Court of Victoria to restrain it from taking further detrimental actions.

Nonetheless, the VLSB persisted in its efforts to coerce Peter into unlawfully breaching client legal privilege. The VLSB’s detrimental actions against Peter included the disruption of his practice through the appointment of an external manager and, later, the non‑renewal of his practising certificate. These efforts are the subject of ongoing proceedings in the Supreme Court of Victoria, which have been unreasonably prolonged, in large part due to the VLSB’s unlawful interference through improper coordination with judicial and administrative officers at the Court.

A central theme of his claim is that the VLSB has maliciously abused its authority to take adverse actions against him for refusing to join a broader unlawful campaign against a politically inconvenient litigant. That experience now anchors Peter’s profile: he writes and speaks not as an abstract critic of “the system”, but as a practitioner who became a target when he refused to bend his ethics to improper institutional pressure.

From Practitioner to Chronicler of Institutional Corruption

Since his experience with the VLSB’s systemic corruption, Peter’s focus has been on understanding and exposing institutional corruption: not bribery in the narrow criminal sense, but the quiet bending of statutory powers to protect insiders, discredit complainants, and insulate regulators and judges from scrutiny.

Drawing on his extensive litigation experience and recent social outreach, he has come to understand that:

• What happened in his and Shivesh’s cases was not an aberration, but part of a broader pattern; 
• Structural incentives within public body structures make it easier to punish dissenting voices than to confront long‑standing abuses of authority; and
• Courts and oversight bodies are far too willing to treat regulatory misconduct as “background noise” instead of recognising it as a central rule‑of‑law problem.

Following his dispute with the VLSB, Peter has worked tirelessly with Shivesh to document how these structural flaws appear in practice: ex parte communications, selective use of suppression orders, back‑channel pressure on courts, and the weaponisation of disciplinary processes against those who refuse to cooperate.

Learning From Other Lawyers and Professionals

A key development in Peter’s work has been his engagement with other professionals who experienced similar treatment. Following Rule O’Flaw’s publication on systemic corruption within the VLSB’s senior ranks, Peter was approached by lawyers and members of the public who:

• Report they were driven out of practice or placed under regulatory pressure after challenging senior officials with the VLSB;
• Complain that disciplinary processes were used as leverage to extract cooperation or silence criticism; and
• Found themselves entangled in opaque complaint processes where the VLSB and oversight bodies appeared more focused on protecting their own reputation than on uncovering the truth.

These conversations have deepened Peter’s understanding of what he recognises as the “adverse selection” problem in regulation. When a system tolerates or even rewards quietly cutting corners while punishing whistleblowers, honest professionals become a liability, and corrupt or pliable actors rise to the top.

Rather than presenting his case as unique, Peter places it within a broader pattern that spans individual personalities and political factions. His writing stresses that what matters is not who holds office at a given moment but the structural incentives that make abuse of power predictable.

A Profile Grounded in Evidence and Experience

Readers should see Peter not as a detached commentator but as someone who has paid a personal and professional price for insisting that the law must bind its own enforcers. His writing, advocacy and strategic work at Rule O’Flaw are grounded in that lived reality.