There's actually a substantial dearth of academic material precisely on the legal status of AFL trading practices vis-a-vis the Trade Practices Act and a whole host of precedent case law (Adamson v NSWRL; R v FCA ex parte WANFL; Hughes v WACA and so on). The question is whether a challenge would succeed. I'm not sure how familiar you are with the corporations power, the characterisation of the AFL as a corporation (see: Adamson) the TPA and the legal considerations that flow therefrom but this quote from Chadwick (when he was writing about Ben Cousins' exclusion from the AFL!) nicely sums it up:
"In professional sport, there are a number of agreements and undertakings that impose conditions that operate as a restraint of trade. Many of these restraints are necessary and reasonable, some more tenuous to the proper administration of the sport. The general issue in determining whether a restraint of trade in sport is reasonable or not, involves a balancing of the interests of the sport...against the adverse effects on the player (such as lost income)."
I'm not entirely sure how you could possibly claim that there are no grounds for legal challenge on that basis - rather, I think any challenge to a PSD system that prevents an uncontracted free agent from freely determining area of the country he is permitted to work in (let alone what specific company - i.e. football club - he works for) would be very heavily scrutinised by the courts. The most closely analogous case is Adamson v NSWRL (1991) which related to the NRL's ‘internal draft’ (much like the PSD) which players submitted themselves to on certain salary terms and conditions - i.e. they had no freedom to choose beyond these terms who they were working for despite being uncontracted. These NSWRL drafting laws were unanimously struck down by the FCA and that's why the NRL trading system is drastically different from the AFL's. I hope you can appreciate how similar the old NRL trading practices are to the AFL's current ones (Davies actually wrote an article in 2006 about how the AFL had to introduce free agency in order to mitigate the chances of a potential legal challenge - which they did introduce but on a restricted basis 6 years later).
So really, there are actually considerable grounds for a legal challenge and Gil would be desperate to avoid these matters going to court. It is largely for these reasons that very few players have to go through entering the PSD while out of contract, primarily because it is in the AFL's and clubs' best interests to keep players from resorting to legal challenge.
Finally, I never suggested Carlton's interests are of any import and I would love to see this matter go to court - it would be thoroughly intriguing and would bear heavily upon a lot of the academic literature around constitutional corporations powers and professional sports practices. My point though, is that it won't go to court because Gil won't let it and because Gold Coast, Evans and Cochrane do what Gil says.
