Hoddle Street killer Julian Knight has lost his latest bid to seek compensation from the Commonwealth for abuse allegedly suffered as a staff cadet at Duntroon nearly three decades ago.
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Knight shot dead seven people and injured 19 when he carried out the massacre in Melbourne's north in 1987, weeks after he was kicked out of Canberra's Royal Military College for stabbing a superior officer.
He has spent the past 30 years behind bars as he serves a life sentence.
Knight, who was last year declared a vexatious litigant for life in Victoria, has since launched a wave of lawsuits that included a failed bid to secure victim compensation from the ACT government and an effort to seek a transfer to Canberra's prison.
In 2014, he began civil action against the Commonwealth in the ACT Supreme Court, claiming negligence for 10 incidents of assault or battery allegedly committed against him in the capital between February and May 1987.
He filed an application for an extension of time to allow the compensation case to be heard outside the statute of limitations.
Knight argued the delay in launching proceedings was partly because he hadn't raised the assault allegations during his murder sentencing due to a plea deal where the Crown allegedly agreed not to contest a minimum non-parole period.
He'd started the latest court action after he was told in late 2013 he would not be released when that term expired.
The case, which the court was told faced delays due to riots at Port Phillip Prison, where Knight has largely been held, was heard in 2015.
Associate Justice David Mossop, in a decision published this week, threw out Knight's case and his application for an extension of time.
He said did not accept his submission there had been a plea deal, or that such an arrangement explained his failure to bring the case to court earlier.
"Instead, the delay should be characterised as a delay resulting from a deliberate decision by the plaintiff not to pursue those issues."
He found Knight had "a mix of motives" for starting the case and noted "clearly litigation is an activity which the plaintiff derives some satisfaction from pursuing".
"For a prisoner of considerable intelligence with a life sentence, the pursuit of litigation is likely to be both intellectually stimulating and a forum in which the disempowerment of being a sentenced prisoner is temporarily removed."
Associate Justice Mossop was satisfied Knight felt genuinely aggrieved by his treatment and sought "such a vindication as the court system can provide in relation to what occurred during his period at the Royal Military College".
He found at least one of the purposes of the proceedings was "to attempt to use them as leverage to set in train a course of events that might have led to the transfer of the plaintiff to the ACT, rather than the vindication of his rights to compensation".
The judge ordered Knight pay costs.
Knight last year lost a separate fight for Commonwealth compensation in the Federal Court after his claim for damages under the Defence Abuse Response Taskforce was knocked back because he was in prison.
