Clear, comprehensive, contextual and critical coverage of the foundational ideas and principles that underpin public law in Australia. Written in an engaging and accessible style, Australian Public Law develops a concept of public law through analysis of the mechanisms of empowerment and constraint and places public law in its historical, social, political, economic and environmental context. The text draws on examples and case studies throughout to demonstrate how institutions, values and interests affect the real-life application and outcomes of public law, and the ongoing contestations of public law that will shape its future development. New to this edition: New co-authors - Megan Davis, a First Nations international human rights and constitutional law expert and Dylan Lino, an expert in constitutional law, colonialism and legal history; updates in light of: public law developments including coverage of:the COVID-19 pandemic; the referendum on a First Nations Voice as called for in the Uluru Statement from the Heart; developments towards Treaties in the States and Territories; the impact of technology on the practice of public law. -- publisher
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How does the Hong Kong National Security Law further complicate women's rights advocacy? This article unpacks the law's impacts on women's organisations and the potential legislative ramifications on women's rights amid growing state interference.
Culture and Identity : Who are 'we and us'? -- Opportunities at the Cultural Interface (Methodology) -- Decolonisation, a Framework for Research -- Mainstream Yarning -- Meaning of Common Language : Respect the Law, Respect Is Law -- Intercultural Decolonisation in Practice -- Knowledge Gained -- Healing and Hope -- Australian Culture : Under Construction.
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The Australian Institute of International Affairs, the International Law Association (Australian Branch) and the Nygh Family are proud to announce that Georgia Lee is the 2024 Peter Nygh Hague Conference Intern. After completing her combined degrees in law and security studies at Macquarie University in November this year, Georgia will commence a six-month internship at […]
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On Tuesday 19 February, AIIA NSW welcomed Professor Simon Butt to speak on judicial dysfunction in Indonesia. Professor Butt's extensive history as a consultant on the Indonesian legal system and his experience as Professor of Indonesian Law and Associate Director of the University of Sydney's Centre for Asian and Pacific Law have cemented his status […]
"This book challenges law's reliance on neurology's brain sex binary. The brain has become the latest candidate in an historical search for a reliable and fixed biological marker of 'true sex' that has permeated every aspect of Western culture, including law. As definitions of the sexed and gendered body have become ever more contentious, the development and dissemination of brain sex theories has come to dominate popular understanding of LGBTI+ identities. But, this book argues, the brain is no more helpful than earlier biological measures in ensuring just outcomes. Examining how law determines and differentiates 'male' and 'female' in two contested areas of sexed identity - through a discussion of Australian cases authorising medical interventions to alter the embodied sex characteristics of transgender minors and intersex minors - the book demonstrates an incoherence in the legal understanding of gender identity development. As the brain too fails as a convincing biological anchor for the binary sex categories of male and female, law must, it is argued, retreat from its aspiration to create, define, and regulate artificially bounded sex categories of male and female. This book will be of great interest to scholars and students in a range of disciplines who are working at the intersection of law, gender and sexuality"--
PurposeIn Family Law Court decisions in Australia, following divorce, the female party is frequently disadvantaged financially in the long term. This paper provides a critical assessment of valuation evidence as a data source in research and discusses valuation accuracy, valuation variation and valuation bias, as well as the Australian family court system and the role of valuers as expert witnesses. In particular, valuation in family law, as it relates to gender inequality, is discussed. The study aims to determine whether the current system of valuation in the Family Law Courts disadvantages women. This paper was important to reveal information that stakeholders in family law cases use on a day-to-day basis.Design/methodology/approachA database of 658 cases was developed and analysed to examine the influence of valuations of the matrimonial home provided by both the male and female parties on the final decision of the court.FindingsFindings showed that valuations from the female party had marginally more influence on the outcome. However, financial disadvantages for the female party persist despite this. This raises several questions for future research, regarding reasons for this persistent disadvantage.Research limitations/implicationsResearch limitations included a time-consuming process.Practical implicationsFurther researchers can use the findings from this paper to further research.Social implicationsSocial implications include the ability of the research to impact on society. In this regard, it was the matrimonial home in relation to divorce proceedings.Originality/valueThe originality of this paper stems from the analysis of a database that was created from a large number of cases from Austlii database family law cases.
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Reports of sexual misconduct by Australian health practitioners against patients continue to increase. Now, Australian health ministers are considering three interesting amendments intended to protect patients from boundary violations.
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Last week brought us the news that Dr. Craig Steven Wright, an eccentric Australian who has long claimed to be Bitcoin's pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto, was bench-slapped by the High Court, where Mr. Justice Mellor ruled at the conclusion of the proceedings that Wright was not Satoshi Nakamoto, not the author of the Bitcoin white paper, not the author of its software and, by extension, not the creator of Bitcoin.This bench ruling comes after years of litigation and weeks of hearings around the question of the provenance of the Bitcoin white paper and software. Full details of the court's findings on these points will be provided in a written judgment at a later date so I refrain from offering my own conclusions on the evidence, or an assessment of correctness of the ruling, here.As is public knowledge, I was one of the first lawyers – if not the first lawyer – to represent a client on the business end of Wright's years-long litigation campaign, when, in 2019, a Twitter user I know was the first crypto community member to receive legal threats from Wright's lawyers for claiming that Wright was not Satoshi, the very conclusion Mr. Justice Mellor also reached today. A short time later, an acquaintance of mine, Peter McCormack, dared to say the same thing. Peter was promptly sued by Wright in England. Wright won his case against Peter, albeit winning only nominal damages of £1 due to certain deficiencies in Wright's case.In my view, Wright's legal team chose to bring these claims in England for one reason, and one reason only: England is, and long has been, the easiest place in the English-speaking world to win a defamation action, because in England, the playing field is tilted so to the advantage of a claimant that even weak claims can win.This is not a new problem, and its roots go deep. Defamation is an ancient tort with its origins in the landed aristocracy seeking to protect their names and reputations from lesser men. The Anglo-Saxon tort of scandalum magnatum, a "fake news" tort for defaming great men of the realm (and thus not a tort capable of being inflicted on lesser men), was used as early as the 13th century. In later years, various other torts like seditious libel were used to punish political dissent – even where that dissent should be substantially true – and the imposition of these ancient rules in the Thirteen Colonies, most famously in the John Peter Zenger trial of 1735, served as focal points around which a new, young nation, the United States of America, began to develop its fledgling judicial system which led, eventually, to its free speech doctrine embodied today by First Amendment jurisprudence.In the modern formulation, defamation is the publication of a statement of fact to a third party, which is false, which is likely to cause serious harm to their reputation. In this respect it differs little from the tort in the United States. However, in England, the history of the tort – protecting the powerful from the powerless – has never been fully written out of its bones, because the burden of proof in a defamation action rests not with the claimant but with the defense. Not with the Saxon noble with the ear of the King, but with the humble pamphleteer who dared to speak out about his abuses. Not with the Member of Parliament accused of some lecherous or disreputable conduct, but the journalist who reported on it. Not with a person claiming to be Bitcoin's creator, offering nothing approaching definitive proof that he or she is (being a transaction or message signed with one of Satoshi's private keys), and armed with institutional financial backing, but the humble Twitter user who simply observed what appeared to be true, based on a cold assessment of the facts, and dared to repeat what he thought was true in writing. Put simply, at any time, in any defamation claim, the deck is always stacked against speakers and favors those who are most likely to be spoken about.On a practical level, this means that it is conceivable that a future plaintiff in England seeking to conceal certain truths or propound certain falsehoods, but with knowledge of the totality of the circumstances concerning that conduct, confidence that he or she can control those variables, and possessing the resources to reasonably predict that he or she will be able to use lawfare to intimidate others from discussing it, can stifle freedom of speech by using the threat of defamation litigation and, in some cases, being less than forthright with the courts. We need not look back to the Saxons to find a proven example of this: see, e.g., Jeffrey Archer, Baron Archer and former Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party, who famously won a defamation case against the Star newspaper over a visit to a prostitute whose life was ruined by the case in the late 1980s, only to be sent to prison a decade and a half later, when his testimony was discovered to have been false.The point is not that Archer lied, or that he was punished for a lie. The point is that his initial case was so weak that he should never have won a civil action in the first place, or assumed that victory was possible, but the structure of English defamation law made a victory possible if not inevitable, thus incentivizing Archer to bring it anyway. Requiring a defendant to prove the truth of his statement, particularly where seeking to prove a negative, can be nearly impossible. It is far fairer and in the interests of justice to require a claimant, who starts the dispute, seeks the remedy, possesses direct knowledge of all of relevant facts about his past conduct, and is the party asking the state to intercede on his or her behalf with the full might of its power, to prove the truth under these circumstances.I offer no view on the truth or falsity of Wright's statements or evidence in this case. That is a matter for the High Court to address in its fuller ruling. What I do know is that the question of the truth of his claims should have been addressed years ago in Wright v. McCormack, but it was not dealt with because the burden of proof was on the defense and the cost of going through the exercise COPA - a coalition of very well-funded corporations - just went through was likely too much for an individual defendant like Peter to bear. In future, it is possible to make England a fairer place for speakers and help the English marketplace of ideas be a home for the truth. Ask claimants in a defamation action to bear the burden of proving their case. It's a simple change. Parliament should make it.
Two western Pacific states — the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea (PNG) — experimented with unusual and ambitious reforms aimed at strengthening political parties in the new millennium. In this paper, we look at what those laws entailed and how they worked in practice. In both cases, we find that unforeseen repercussions dominated. In PNG, the new laws encouraged candidates who formerly contested as independents to now nominate as members of microscopic one‐ or two‐member parties whereas in the Solomon Islands many formerly party‐affiliated candidates adjusted by contesting as independents. In PNG, the law was one of a range of devices aimed at strengthening incumbent governments, but money politics and manipulation of parliamentary procedure proved more significant. Core anti‐defection provisions in the new law were ruled unconstitutional in 2010, but other still valid clauses preserved an advantage for the "largest party" in government formation. In the Solomon Islands, the law created a shadow world of free‐floating individuals able to switch at liberty between formally constrained hermit crab shell parties. In neither country did these laws succeed in strengthening party systems.
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was the only multilateral environmental agreement to emerge from the Earth Summit in 1992 which did not include any references to gender. Recognition of gender within the UNFCCC has been exceedingly slow and largely tokenistic with a focus on ensuring 'gender balance' within UNFCCC meetings and processes. This article explores the emergence of gender language within the UNFCCC by reflecting upon: where we have come from; where we are now; and where we are going with respect with gender. While there was very little progress in the early days of the UNFCCC, this article shows that from 2001 onwards there have been a series of small gains, which will be explained and critique. Much work remains to be done with this paper suggesting some concrete steps such as hosting a Gender COP, ensuring financing for National Climate Change Gender Focal Points and embedding gender meaningfully within existing climate finance processes. In recommending future actions, the paper draws on insights from the Pacific and Australian experience.