The Australian Taxation Office held this was tax avoidance, but the test case was decided in favour of the taxpayer, one of the students, Brian Cridland.

Amendments tightening the definition of a primary producer were subsequently made, so such a scheme would fail today.

O'Shea had one of his companies acquire land and lease (or otherwise grant) use of that to newly formed unit trusts.

In 1969 O'Shea distributed pamphlets advertising his scheme at universities in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria.

Brian Cridland, the subject of the court action, was a student at the University of Queensland nearing the end of his engineering degree course.

The Australian Taxation Office decided the scheme was a form of tax avoidance, and under the general anti-avoidance provision of ITAA section 260 (which was operative at that time) they ignored Cridland's interest in the trusts and issued assessments for tax years ending 30 June 1970, 1971 and 1972 accordingly.

Cridland took the matter to the Supreme Court of New South Wales, where Justice Mahoney agreed with the commissioner.

This included not applying it to transactions "of a normal character", nor as decided in Keighery v Federal Commissioner of Taxation (1957) to matters where the statute contains alternatives available to the taxpayer (in that case a public versus private company).

The justices followed their own High Court decision in Mullens v Federal Commissioner of Taxation (1976),[4] not decided until after Mahoney had made his judgement.