A Misuse of the Law to Silence Me: Vegan Activist Tash Peterson on Liquor Premises Ban
The disruptive protests of animal rights activist Tash Peterson have caused such a stir in her home state of Western Australia over the last three years, that WA police recently banned her from all licensed premises, issuing a barring notice under...
UN Inspection Body Visit Should Spur Action on Detainee Abuse, Says Shoebridge
Then attorney general George Brandis ratified the Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture, otherwise known as the OPCAT, on 15 December 2017, which means our nation agreed to establish a UN governed system of independent bodies to inspect Australia’s places of...
“Police Powers Are Bleeding Out”: Redfern Legal Centre’s Sam Lee on the Strip Search Class Action
The long-awaited strip search class action was filed in the Common Law Division of the NSW Supreme Court on 21 July. The proceedings will cover all music festival attendees, who’ve registered and been subjected to a suspect strip search at events...
The Laws Relating to Cyber Bullying and Online Abuse in Australia
The Online Safety Act 2021 (Cth) was passed by the Australian Parliament on 23 June 2021 and came into effect on 23 January 2022. The second reading speeches to the Act makes clear that its objectives include: Protecting Australian adults...
Big Australian Retailers Sprung Collecting Customer’s Faceprints
In a move right out of former Liberal home affairs minister Peter Dutton’s playbook, a number of Australian retailers were recently found to be utilising biometric facial recognition technology to capture digital “faceprints” of customers that can be matched to...
Australian Imams Call Out Beijing’s Oppression of the Uyghur People
The Australian National Imams Council (ANIC) released a statement last Friday, calling out the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) decades-long persecution of the Uyghur people in their homelands, which has only been intensifying over recent years. The Uyghurs are a Central Asian...
The Offence of Giving False or Misleading Information to a Public Authority in NSW
Now former New South Wales police Commander Michael Rowan has been sentenced to 8 months in prison with a non-parole period of six months after pleading guilty to two counts of knowingly giving false or misleading evidence to a public...
Australian Territories Could Be Given the Right to Introduce Euthanasia Laws
Two Federal Labor backbenchers have introduced a Bill which could end to the Commonwealth’s paternalistic ban on the Territories legalising the right to die within their borders. If passed, the will give the territories greater autonomy in the area of...
Attorney General to Restore Human Rights Commission, After Coalition Destroyed It
Following his decision to drop the prosecution against ACT barrister Bernard Collaery, federal attorney general Mark Dreyfus is continuing to clean up the deplorable condition nine years’ worth of Coalition chief lawmakers left the nation’s legal affairs in. On the...
The Sun Has Quietly Set on the NT Intervention, or Has It?
Considering the Howard government deployed ADF troops to remote Aboriginal communities in June 2007 to implement the NT Intervention, the brief 17 June post on a federal agency website announcing the main legislation facilitating the policy has just expired seems...
