Law & Crime

In the flood of disclosures that followed revelations about Harvey Weinstein’s decades-long abuse of women, there was hope for change and reform. Hope that individuals and institutions would finally be held accountable for their role in perpetuating sexual violence, and that attitudes and behaviours could genuinely be reformed. This week marks two years since the Me Too hashtag went viral on Twitter.

White Ribbon was the most visible organisation in Australia dedicated to ending men’s violence against women. Yet its actions repeatedly frustrated the domestic violence sector, survivors and their supporters. Those actions demonstrated a fundamental failure to understand the problem that White Ribbon was meant to be fixing.

In recent months, I have sat in court as an observer as Canberra lawyer Bernard Collaery has faced charges over disclosing information about the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS). On Thursday, Collaery’s case was back before the Supreme Court of the Australian Capital Territory. It is a good time, then, to consider this case and the national security state’s assault on Australia’s democratic culture more generally.

There’s no doubt the populist backlash over attempts to deport a Tamil family from Queensland has caught the government by surprise. All of a sudden the perceived advantage for the Coalition in the areas of national and border security was slipping from its grasp. This was all the more of a shock to the minister for Home Affairs, Peter Dutton, who has been assiduously attacking Labor on the issues since the election.

Every young protester is worried about being critically injured by police who use excessive violence. They fear being arrested and charged, of facing a possible 10-year jail sentence for rioting. But if they choose to remain silent, they may lose this last chance to help Hong Kong maintain its autonomy from Beijing.

Tasmanian independent Jacqui Lambie has returned to the senate convinced that people don’t trust politicians. That’s the message she received anywhere she went in the island state during her enforced exile from parliament over citizenship eligibility, she says. And that’s why she and other crossbenchers in both the house of representatives and the senate are calling for the urgent establishment of a national integrity commission.

Sources close to the North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency (NAAJA) say its lawyers were surprised to learn neither the Department of Justice nor the Territory’s chief judge had received a formal complaint from the agency about Alice Springs Local Court judge Greg Borchers. That news came via media reports last month, which publicised the bewildering comments Borchers has made in court regarding Aboriginal defendants.

Many of the most dangerous coercive controllers use physical violence sparingly, or not at all. Their system of fear and control requires only the believable threat of violence – to the victim or her loved ones. Savvy perpetrators know to avoid physical violence because while “incidents” of domestic violence are a crime, the system of coercive control is not.

The Australian Federal Police raids on the offices of the ABC and the home of a News Corp journalist keep being described as ‘unprecedented’. They are certainly a degeneration, though these goonish interventions have always been there. Only their targets and locations have changed. An unbroken chain of raids, prosecutions, bannings, destructions, libel suits, intimidation and blacklistings drags its way through our history, all the way to the early colony.

Scott Morrison and his treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, don’t intend to repeat the Keating government’s mistake of crab-walking away from their key pre-election promises, not that they made many. Frydenberg still trumpets the $100 billion promise over 10 years for infrastructure, but is just as adamant he won’t be bringing any of it forward. He says half of it will be spent during the next four years. The RBA governor is looking for more stimulus now.