Last week, US President Donald Trump signed off on two new laws which threaten to profoundly change the way we think about internet freedom, and sex workers are feeling the brunt of it. SESTA/FOSTA, or the Stop Enabling Sex-Trafficking Act and Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, became law on April 11. The dual legislation gives US ...
Category: Criminal Law
Lest We Forget the Frontier Wars
As Australians gather on April 25 to commemorate those who fell in conflicts on foreign soils, the nation still refuses to officially acknowledge the bloody conflicts that raged across this continent for close to a century and a half, known as the Frontier Wars. In the days leading up to Anzac Day, the Frontier Wars Story ...
It’s Time to Address Our Youth Homelessness Crisis
Australia – the lucky country. A nation where, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, more than 116,000 people are homeless. And while that’s what the statistics say, those working at the front line believe the number is closer to 300,000 – and that about 100,000 of those are youths. Every night, young people who ...
Woman Who Defrauded Victims by Claiming to Have Cancer Imprisoned
A 24-year old woman who convinced her parents, friends and neighbours to give her tens of thousands of dollars by falsely claiming that she required the money for lifesaving cancer treatment has been sentenced to three months in prison and a 12 month community corrections order, in a case reminiscent of the Belle Gibson fraud. ...
Government Wants Crime Commission to Lose Its Ability to Investigate
By Zeb Holmes and Ugur Nedim The New South Wales Crime Commission is a statutory body established by the state government in 1986 to, as its motto says, ‘Analyse. Investigate. Confiscate’; that is, to analyse and investigate serious criminal activity, and confiscate proceeds of crime. The Commission has extensive powers to investigate crime and gather ...
The Rise of Australian Neo-Nazis: An Interview with Online Activist Slackbastard
Over recent years, a number of loosely affiliated white nationalist groups have been organising online and rallying on the streets in this country. And these far-right groupings are united in their hostility towards asylum seekers, immigration, as well as the Muslim religion. The first to appear as part of this resurgence in so-called “patriotism” was ...
Wrongly Convicted Man Awarded $1.5 Million
By Sonia Hickey and Ugur Nedim A cognitively-impaired Indigenous man who spent nearly five years in a Western Australian prison for a crime he didn’t commit has received compensation. The Western Australian government has provided a cognitively-impaired Indigenous man with an ex gratia payment of $1.5 million after he spent almost five years in prison ...
Client Legal Privilege in New South Wales
By Zeb Holmes and Ugur Nedim Donald Trump is fighting attempts by US prosecutors to obtain approval to review communications seized from the home and offices of his lawyer, Michael Cohen. It is reported that Trump is concerned, among other things, about the exposure of his instructions regarding how “potential negative sources of publicity” should ...
Cold Cases Still Warm: Sexual Assault at Sydney Uni and ‘Suicide’ at Koorawatha
At 7.15 am on October 29 1977, Annette Louise Morgan set off down inner city Sydney’s Glebe Point Road to meet a friend at the notorious St Paul’s College at Sydney University. Less than two hours later, her body was found dumped on a pile of rubble in a gully by the college oval. The 18-year-old Royal ...
Government Promises to Finally Make Medicinal Cannabis Accessible
At a Council of Australian Governments health council meeting last Friday, all state and territory health ministers signed onto a national scheme to streamline patient access to medicinal cannabis products. Federal health minister Greg Hunt said prescribing cannabis medicine will be left up to medical professionals. But once that decision is made, a medicinal cannabis script will ...