Courts hear very few claims about sexual harassment. The vast majority are resolved through confidential conciliation processes or are withdrawn. Through an examination of a decade of federal sexual harassment cases, this Brief identifies some of the reasons women are reluctant to litigate sexual harassment claims including having to give evidence and being cross-examined, the financial and emotional cost of litigation, and the impact a trial can have on the complainant’s health and wellbeing.
Fines for fare evasion are the most commonly issued penalties to young people in New South Wales (NSW). Public transport is fundamental to a young person’s growing independence as well as to access education, employment and maintain social ties. This article reports on high volumes of fines issued to young people up to the age of 25 for fare evasion in NSW and patterns of fine issuance by police and transit officers. Too many young people are still punished for their inability to pay for fares. We advocate for reform that would ensure young people in NSW have access to free public transport.
In 2026, people gathered with the Balanggarra to reflect on the actions of a police and civilian punitive patrol that arbitrarily killed and then burnt the bodies of many women and men in the Kimberley, Western Australia in 1926. A Royal Commission in 1927 found that at least 11 people were murdered and the deaths of two women and two men were the sole responsibility of two police constables. This personal reflection considers the evidence which sustained the Commissioner’s Finding and calls on others to embrace truth-telling and remember this history.
In late March 2026, Queensland police directed a Brisbane artist to remove satirical works responding to new laws criminalising the prohibited expressions ‘from the river to the sea’ and ‘globalise the intifada’. This article argues that these new laws represent the most direct criminalisation of artistic expression in Australia since the Bjelke-Petersen era, situating it within a longer Queensland history and a national pattern of rushed post-Bondi legislation. Focusing on the distinctive democratic value and structural vulnerability of artists, it contends that the Act’s ‘artistic purpose’ defence offers no meaningful protection, that the law is constitutionally vulnerable, and that its chilling effect is already evident.
A vital protection against abuses in detention is regular independent monitoring. But in Australia we have seen international detention monitoring bodies prevented from visiting detention facilities, and we have seen the refusal in some jurisdictions to fully implement a United Nations treaty ratified by Australia aimed at ensuring we have a comprehensive network of detention monitoring bodies. What is happening to our engagement with human rights at the international level?
On 11 February 2026, some 14 months after Bird v DP (a pseudonym) was handed down, the High Court revisited key questions of liability in historical child abuse cases in AA v Trustees of the Roman Catholic Church for the Diocese of Maitland-Newcastle . These two cases intersect in critical ways, revealing intellectual legal preferences for the determination of liability in this area and have had a significant impact (directly or indirectly) improving the rights of institutional child abuse victims to compensation.
Despite community expectations that housing provides shelter and safety to its inhabitants, inadequate housing is also a significant social determinant of death. This article examines reports by the Northern Territory Coroner in terms of the systemic and individual factors contributing to deaths caused by housing. These reports highlight the maintenance work instigated by preventable deaths and the need for greater investment in preventive housing maintenance. The article concludes by reflecting on the coronial archive as an object for further examination of housing harms.
Climate justice has failed to fully wrestle with the link between climate change and colonisation. A new definition for climate justice is needed - one that more firmly foregrounds the needs and priorities of First Nations peoples in colonised places such as Australia. This definition must not only highlight the connections between colonisation and climate change but must conceptualise how both mitigation and adaptation continue to be shaped by colonial power structures. For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, climate justice can only be achieved through emancipation and the right to self-determine pathways that will provide First Nations communities with the power and authority to implement solutions for the mutual benefit of Country and people. For climate action to be just, emancipation from colonial systems of injustice must be addressed from the outset and made a central pillar of all contemporary climate policy proposals. Ultimately, this article concludes that the most significant forms of climate justice in Australia are sustained resistance and opposition to colonial systems of oppression. Reparations may be a part of this, but they are not the only or even the most important part.
The Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage ('FRLD') marks a milestone as the first global mechanism for addressing climate impacts beyond mitigation and adaptation. This article analyses its evolving governance, political paradoxes and regional significance. While World Bank administration ensures early functionality, it also raises concerns over autonomy and access. The FRLD reflects demands for justice from vulnerable States but avoids liability or compensation language. To be located in the Philippines and shaped by Pacific leadership, it opens space to advance recognition of non-economic losses, pilot direct access and strengthen regional agency. The article argues that the FRLD's legitimacy and future trajectory will hinge on governance choices that reconcile financial integrity with responsiveness to affected communities. The direction it takes in its formative years will determine whether it becomes another technocratic instrument of limited reach or a mechanism capable of advancing justice-oriented climate finance.
Time is a challenge for applicants in negligence-based climate litigation. Climate change harm is a temporally complex phenomenon that demands attention to the past, present and future, including histories of colonialism. Negligence law, however, demands temporal boundaries be drawn in order, among other things, to place limits on the scope and content of one person's duty to be careful of another. Decisions regarding what time frames are relevant to an assessment of responsibility for climate harms are neither inevitable nor neutral. They have political and material implications for how law deals with historical legacies. This article explores how the temporal narrative of climate change in Pabai, and specifically the applicants' claims regarding the existence of Commonwealth duties of care, challenged conventional boundaries of negligence law, while simultaneously being critical to the expressivist messaging of the case.
This article responds to the problem of climate change and migration, and the tendency to seek solutions in legal frameworks that protect individual migrants. It analyses two alternative approaches, which argue for facilitating migration as a form of reparations and as a means for meeting adaptation obligations in the international climate regime. After analysing alignments and tensions between these two approaches, the article concludes that legal arguments for State obligations to support adaptation offer one potential means for pursuing climate reparations, including through migration.
This article provides a philosophical argument that business corporations, especially fossil fuel corporations, bear moral obligations for climate reparation. It identifies four philosophical grounds of such duties. Reparative actions might include monetary transfers, structural remediation or relationship repair. The article offers contributions in two places. First, the proposed ethical obligations provide normative foundations for legislative reform. Second, it highlights the transformative power of shareholders in inducing corporations to enact their obligations, even from within the existing legal parameters of the corporation.
As loss and damage from climate change continue to mount, there are growing calls from affected communities for both more aggressive climate action and compensation from the historically highest emitting countries that have largely caused the crisis. There is an expanding body of research exploring multiple dimensions of climate reparations. However, in Australia there has so far been limited scholarly, policy, or legal debate regarding the specific responsibilities of governments, organisations, and corporations in addressing the escalating damage to the climate system. This article seeks to develop key themes and questions for a broader research agenda on climate reparations in Australia.
This article examines how transitional justice frameworks can inform climate reparations debates. Drawing on lessons from international criminal and human rights courts, as well as non-judicial reparation programs, it highlights the importance of victim participation, multifaceted redress, and credible guarantees of non-repetition in designing effective reparative mechanisms for climate harms. The analysis looks beyond State-to-State obligations to consider reparations owed to individuals, communities and ecosystems, including through ecocentric approaches and the potential criminalisation of ecocide. It argues that, while transitional justice cannot resolve the climate crisis, it offers guidance for designing reparative mechanisms that are participatory, multi-layered and credible.
In the current political environment, there is a heightened debate around gender identity and the law. This article provides a reflective approach to exploring legal regulation of gender identity in relation to public bathrooms, with particular attention to access issues for trans and gender diverse people, building on earlier scholarship and recent public debates. Reflecting on these debates, the author draws from their personal experience to examine laws and regulations governing provision of and access to gendered and non-gendered bathrooms in Victoria, Australia and argues for regulatory reforms to mandate the provision of all-gender bathrooms in public buildings alongside gendered options.
The Victorian Federation of Community Legal Centres (FCLC) commissioned research to work out why people join the Victorian community legal sector. A focus group was conducted, data was collected, and this article reflects the findings. We explore how the language and concepts the participants shared in their responses connect to significant principles and theories of community legal action (a praxis).
This article argues that legal education must reclaim its public role through critical and transformative pedagogy. Drawing on interviews with animal law educators from five Australian universities, it examines the disconnect between how educators describe their teaching - often in neutral terms - and the reality of their classroom practices, which reflect critical and transformative approaches. These practices foster ethical reflection, emotional engagement and justice-oriented learning. The article calls for greater recognition and support of such pedagogies as essential to preparing students to question legal norms and challenge injustice within and beyond the law.
Ultra-processed foods supply 42 per cent of Australians' dietary energy and are now conclusively linked to higher risks of obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and increased mortality. Yet Australian food law treats danger chiefly as acute contamination rather than foreseeable chronic harm. This article argues that the existing concepts of 'unsafe food' in the Food Acts and 'acceptable quality' in s 54 of the Australian Consumer Law already accommodate chronic metabolic risk when interpreted in line with contemporary evidence. It sets out a practical reform package using nutrient ceilings, warning labels, marketing controls, stronger enforcement and expanded public-interest standing.
The failure of the Voice Referendum in October 2023 cannot be seen in isolation; its roots lie in the policies of the Howard government nearly three decades earlier. From the undermining of native title to the abolition of ATSIC and resistance to reconciliation, Howard's systematic dismantling of the modest reforms initiated under Hawke and Keating set the stage for the rejection of the Voice. Beyond the referendum itself, the continued denial of self-determination is evident in the unfulfilled recommendations of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and the stalled progress of Closing the Gap, leaving Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples facing a bleak status quo.
