In That Case

#ITC27: Claire Gibbs on Love and Thoms Daniel Love and Brendan Thoms moved to Australia when small children. Each of them had an Aboriginal parent. They never, though, became Australian citizens. When they faced visa cancellation because of their criminal offending, the High Court had to the deal with the question: could an indigenous Australian be treated as an ‘alien’, and removed?

#ITC25: Laurie Levy on Levy v Victoria From the mid-1980s, Laurie Levy waged a campaign against duck shooting. In the early to mid-1990s, the High Court began to expand on the notion of an implied freedom of political communication. In 1994, Laurie Levy was charged with unlawful entry into a duck hunting area, and his campaign and the implied freedom collided in the High Court.

#ITC23: Sue Hackney, Jim McKenna and Rufus Black on Cobaw (part 1) In June 2007, a staff member at Cobaw Community Health Services, Sue Hackney, tried to book a camp on Phillip Island for a weekend forum. She was booking on behalf of a group of young people identifying as same sex attracted. The camp manager said they wouldn’t be welcome, because of the religious convictions of the Christian Brethren, which owned and ran the camp. The young people, and Cobaw, brought a complaint which ventilated one of the most significant issues in Australian public life: when should religious beliefs provide an exemption from anti-discrimination law?

#ITC21: Stuart Webb on Nystrom Stefan Nystrom was born in Sweden, when his mother, an Australian permanent resident, was on holiday visiting her family in Scandinavia. He returned to Australia at when he was 27 days old. He lived his life in Australia, not knowing he was not a citizen, until his visa was cancelled because of his serious criminal record, and he faced removal. His case paved the way for the increased use of the Minister for Immigration’s ‘character cancellation’ power. Stuart Webb represented him on his journey through the Australian courts.

#ITC19: Corinna Horvath and Dyson Hore-Lacy SC on Horvath In March 1996, police raided Corinna Horvath’s home without a warrant. She spent several days in hospital as a result of the raid. She pursued a claim against the police officers involved, and against the State of Victoria. The dispute lasted more than 20 years, through a County Court trial, an appeal, and a complaint to the UN Human Rights Committee. It lead to fundamental change in litigating claims of police misconduct.

#ITC17: Felicity Graham on Bugmy The question of how the criminal law ought deal with socioeconomic disadvantage, and in particular the disadvantage experienced by Aboriginal people, is one of the most challenging in sentencing law in Australia. In Bugmy, the High Court looked at these key issues, and articulated key principles about how sentences should be imposed in Australia. Felicity Graham represented William Bugmy, a man from Western NSW whose case raised these fundamental questions, and whose case has shaped Australian jurisprudence about them.

#ITC15: Greg McIntyre on Mabo No.1 For more than a decade, Greg McIntyre was one of the lawyers at the centre of an effort by a group of Murray Islanders, seeking recognition in Australian law that their native title rights had survived European settlement. In 1992, this resulted in the famous Mabo judgment, but before that, the plaintiffs had to deal with an attempt by the Queensland Parliament to extinguish any native title rights which might have survived on the islands.

#ITC13: Jeremy Jones on the Toben case In 1995, new provisions were introduced into the Racial Discrimination Act. One of those sections, 18C, still excites considerable controversy. It prohibits certain kinds of offensive, racially motivated conduct. Jeremy Jones, from the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, was centrally involved in efforts to use s18C to deal with Holocaust deniers. One particularly long-running and significant instance of this involved Frederick Toben, who was imprisoned for contempt of the Federal Court, after many years of litigation.

#ITC11: Patrick McInerney on the Catch the Fire Ministries Case In 2002, a Christian group called ‘Catch the Fire Ministries’ conducted a seminar on Islam. Members of the Islamic Council of Victoria attended, and in response to what was presented: Islam equated with violent jihad, brought an action under Victoria’s Racial and Religious Tolerance Act. VCAT found in the Islamic Council’s favour, but Catch the Fire Ministries appealed, successfully, to the Court of Appeal. Father Patrick McInerney, a Columban priest and an expert on Islam, was a witness for the Islamic Council. He did not know what he would face, in the course of the hearing.

ITC#9: Michael Kirby and Mark Aarons on the 1951 referendum An extra episode, supplementing #ITC8: Following the finding of the High Court that the legislation effecting a ban on the Australian Communist Party was invalid, the Menzies government went to the Australian people to seek an amendment to the Constitution. Justice Michael Kirby and Mark Aarons discuss the referendum and its implications. Thanks also to the National Library of Australia, for the use of excerpts from its oral history collection: Laurie Aarons interviewed by Stewart Harris, 1991 Dec.17-1992 Mar. 4, ORAL TRC 2788.

ITC#7: Tim Marsh on DPP v Walters Politicians regularly seek to constrain the discretion of sentencing judges. Victoria’s baseline sentencing regime was a strange, unique, and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to do so. Tim Marsh talks about the decisions of the Supreme Court and Court of Appeal in DPP v Walters, which grappled with this unusual legislative scheme.  

ITC#5: Brian Walters on environmental protest From bushwalking, to establishing Wild magazine, to supporting the Franklin Dam campaign, to decades representing environmental protesters. Brian Walters talks about this history, and about some key cases he’s been involved in: representing protesters against a South Australian uranium mine, and Bob Brown when he protested logging the Goolengook.

ITC#3: Rodney Croome on Croome v Tasmania In 1993, Nicholas Toonen and Rodney Croome took Australia to the UN Human Rights Committee, on the basis Tasmania’s anti-gay laws. After the Committee found Australia in breach of its international human rights obligations, the Commonwealth Parliament legislated to render the Tasmanian laws inoperative. But Tasmania still didn’t repeal the laws, so Croome and Toonen went to the High Court…