Law & Crime

If we didn’t riot, if we didn’t bring attention to the situation that way, all of these abuses would still be hidden out of sight. No one would know what goes on in Don Dale. Ultimately, we need all youth detention centres shut down and resources and power given to Aboriginal community leaders to develop alternative programs and facilities based on country, to help children who are caught up in violence and trauma to heal.

Anti-association laws, similar to those proposed by Victoria, were adopted by the NSW government in 2012. During a review of these laws in 2016, the NSW ombudsman found that 7 per cent of “consorting warnings” were directed at children. Indigenous Australians were subject to 40 per cent of such warnings, more than half of them directed at Aboriginal women. Two thirds of the 83 children aged between 13 and 17 years old who received consorting warnings were Aboriginal. In 2011, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders comprised 2.9 per cent of the total NSW population.

These are the stories of our lives and they are being written without any chance for us to control or influence them. We are pawns in a larger game. That is the shameful carelessness of racism – some people are viewed simply as a means to an end. For politicians, we are not people with lives, with children whose dignity and worth we seek to preserve, with loved ones who will be denied employment, with mothers who will be called “black dogs” while going to a shopping centre, with brothers who are afraid they will be mistaken for gang members when they are out with their friends. To these politicians we are not people. We are not even fellow citizens.

When the world’s first official MSIC opened in Bern, Switzerland, in 1986, Australia was a world leader in pragmatic public health interventions. Faced with the serious threat of an HIV epidemic beginning among people who inject drugs then spreading to the general population, policymakers took action and introduced programs such as the needle and syringe exchange. But in the decades since, as almost 100 MSICs have been opened around the world, Australia has dragged its feet.

Through all this, the notion that consent may be withdrawn retroactively looms large as the debate’s most dangerous idea. Beyond the fringes of radical feminism and the nightmares of “men’s rights” activism, however, the concept is less about women deciding, wilfully, to repaint past experiences as rape, and more about empowering people to appreciate the moments in their lives where consent may not have been freely given.

The old boys’ network will zealously shield their progeny from adverse consequences – not simply out of a filial loyalty, but to protect the institutions from which they drew their own power. While researching The Red Zone Report we heard from several former college students who had either self-harmed or become suicidal in response to the hazing they experienced at college. But we also discovered that the most vociferous defenders of hazing and initiation rituals were alumni groups themselves.

#MeToo’s corroboration of multiple accusers offers women a chink of light in this judicial impasse. In this entirely untested extra-legal and post-hoc process, millions of women have made abundantly clear that corroboration is solidarity. The onus is now on law reformers to listen to this core articulation of #MeToo – embrace corroboration and change rape law to admit prior convictions as evidence.

This is a victory of the people over the church, of secular views over dogma, of human rights over religious constraint, and of empirical evidence over fear and doubt. The bill allows, very simply, for people who are terminally ill and suffering intolerably to ask a doctor for assistance to die.

This is the sad song of contemporary feminism: burnout for the women who speak up, endless “cookies” for the men who offer little more than lip service. It’s bittersweet to admit that women and other marginalised people don’t seem to be able to shatter this status quo: if we are truly to conquer the Stone Age behaviours of men such as Harvey Weinstein, we need their fellow straight, white men to intervene, to demand a different standard.

There is a tension between lawyers championing the cause of a free press and what the free press does once it gets its hands on the information. Last year, the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal made some important in-principle rulings about take-down orders affecting news media websites. Even though these judgements contained important rulings on the relevant law, they were themselves subject to non-publication orders because of trials that were under way.