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The Australian Human Rights Commission has claimed that recognising religious corporations as litigants in religious discrimination claims departs from international human rights law, which only protects the rights of natural legal persons. In this article we respond to that claim by arguing that under international law, Australia should protect the ability of religious groups to be litigants, including corporations. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights requires Australia to respect and ensure individuals have the right to manifest their beliefs in community with others, and that such communities are protected against discrimination on religious grounds. This requirement entails granting religious groups the ability to pursue legal measures to preserve the enjoyment of these rights by their members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Daniel Billy et al. v Australia is the first successful climate litigation case before a United Nations ('UN') human rights body. On September 23 2022, the UN Human Rights Committee found in favour of a group of eight Torres Strait Islanders, concluding that Australia's failure to adequately protect them against adverse impacts of climate change violated their rights to enjoy their culture under Article 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and be free from arbitrary interferences with their private life, family and home under Article 17. Here, we discuss the decision and its broader context and significance in Australia and globally.**** [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australia’s failure to sign the United Nations 1953 Convention on the Political Rights of Women became a galvanising issue for feminist organisations in the 1950s and 1960s. The government could not sign the convention while many state laws failed to comply in matters of women’s entitlement to hold public office and to exercise all public functions. Particularly aggravating were the bar on married women’s employment, lack of equal pay, retirement age discrimination and inability to serve on juries. Although a trial by jury was explicit in the Constitution, the judicial framework remained based in state jurisdictions. Feminist organisations turned to international instruments to overcome the federal government’s reluctance to pressure the states to make Australia nationally compliant. This article takes the significance of jury reform as both instrumental to and symbolic of women’s citizenship status and argues for the importance of internationalism in this period of Australia’s feminist history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can the displacement of refugees continue to be understood as exceptional? The recent global increase in refugees has prompted calls to develop new solutions to displacement that focus on integrating refugees into the local economies of nations that receive them. Transforming refugees from economic burdens to economic benefits does not, however, resolve displacement: doing so only shifts the project of refugee protection from a supposedly humanitarian imperative to an economic incentive. Examining how political economy intersects with moral economy in the global refugee regime by drawing on fieldwork conducted with refugees in Uganda and Australia, I describe how efforts to incorporate refugees into local economies not only fail to resolve their displacement but serve to exacerbate it, with such 'humanitarian exploits' transforming refugees from recipients of humanitarian aid to highly exploitable workers who are, in their words, unable to 'make a life'. I consider that continuing to analyse refugees as objects of humanitarian intervention rather than actors in a globalised political economy is a way to reproduce the exceptionality of refugee experiences and conceal how their lives are implicated within and indicative of new formations of global capitalism. Not only is the displacement of refugees not exceptional: it is emblematic of an increasingly globalised experience of ordinary displacement through which citizenship and civic rights are stratified by reducing the value of human life to the potential to extract economic productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In March 2019 the High Court of Australia will, for the first time, consider the constitutionality of limitations on the political expression of public servants. Comcare v Banerji will shape the Commonwealth of Australia's regulation of its 240 000 public servants and indirectly impact state and local government employees, cumulatively constituting 16 per cent of the Australian workforce. But the litigation's importance goes beyond its substantive outcome. In Comcare v Banerji, the High Court must determine the appropriate methodology to apply when considering the implied freedom of political communication's operation on administrative decisions. The approach it adopts could have a significant impact on the continuing development of implied freedom jurisprudence, as well as the political expression of public servants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The focus of the book is on legal process corruption and miscarriages of justice - a field somewhat underdeveloped in the Fitzgerald Inquiry and in associated scholarship. However, the author has carried out extensive and painstaking primary research on areas of police malfeasance which were not explored in depth by the Inquiry or in subsequent research. Paul Bleakley's I Under a Bad Sun i is an aptly titled and very welcome addition to the literature on the system of police and political corruption operating in Queensland - "the sunshine state" - from the 1950s to the 1980s - much of it revealed by the Fitzgerald Commission of Inquiry report in 1989. [Extracted from the article]

The "electoral mandate" serves a useful function as a political weapon in competitive party democracies, notwithstanding the ambiguities, multi‐layered complexities and uncertainty of many of the issues which the concept involves. The diverse uses of "mandate" indicate competing ideas in Australian politics about the responsibilities of parties to pursue commitments made during campaigns and the extent of rights to govern. This article portrays mandate not as a "theory" or "doctrine", but as a rhetorical device that needs to be examined in the context of "contested word use" in political speech. The renewed interest in the study of rhetoric reflects the usefulness of examining multiple and layered meanings that exist under what ostensibly may appear as "empty rhetoric", and to understand how rhetoric is used to persuade an audience of the validity of a particular action or viewpoint. While mandate often comes under attack as "meaningless", it is a useful persuasive tool employed by politicians to consolidate their legitimacy and justify their rights to implement a political agenda and, as such, it contributes to public discourses relating to the nature of political representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online petitions are an important feature of contemporary political engagement in advanced democracies. In this paper we report on a unique data set - covering a five year period and over 17,000 petitions - documenting the development of the Change.org platform in Australia. Australia presents an interesting case as, until very recently, there was no national government hosted online petition site. Our analysis results in three findings that advance scholarship on online petitions. First, we find the majority of petitions are in fact targeted at government, and that their issue area is of a political nature. Second, we find that most signers of petitions sign a single petition - they are not serial participants. Finally, we show that ‘super users’ of the online petition system engage broadly as well as often. Together these findings demonstrate that online petition creation and signing - even on commercial platforms - is a distinct and important part of citizen engagement in politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New South Wales has recently joined several other Australian states in enacting anti-protest laws. Although environmental protests (particularly those against mining) have been the political and economic driving force behind the drafting of the laws in each state, the NSW law explicitly targets this issue. This article explores the political context of the new laws and what the law does. It then critiques the government's claim that the laws concern safety rather than targeting protests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the laws related to voting rights of persons with mental disabilities in Australia. Topics discussed include need of law governing political franchise without discrimination against persons with mental disabilities; domestic and international trends in adult guardianship and the political rights of persons with mental disabilities; and Japanese legal framework for guardianship, capacity, and voting.

Australia is often said to be the only democratic nationwithout a national Bill of Rights, Human Rights Act or other general human rights law. This presents a certain set of challenges. The Australian response has been to adopt a model of political rights review-relying on the effective scrutiny of parliament to uphold human rights norms. As other countries, including the UK, consider alternate mechanisms for human rights enforcement, it is appropriate to reflect upon the Australian experience. Political rights review is affected by the broader political architecture-in Australia strong party discipline and the Federal structure both have the potential to impact on the effective operation of the Human Rights (Parliamentary Scrutiny) Act 2011 (Cth). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Female political activism and economic engagement in the Australian colonies are usually located within the last decades of the nineteenth century, yet a reexamination of the 1850s reveals that the twin issues of women's political rights and activities within the public sphere were raised much earlier. This article shows that as the Australian colonies achieved self-government and manhood suffrage and experienced the upheaval of successive gold rushes around the Pacific, there were heated debates about women's roles within the public sphere. Evidence drawn from the law, trade directories, passenger lists, newspapers, and contemporary fiction reveals the extent of both women's work and the debate. The participation of women in business and the articulation of demands for political rights were part of a transnational midcentury phenomenon but had distinctive Australian qualities, preparing the ground for later suffrage success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Questions about Muslims, multiculturalism and citizenship continue to shape the political discourse of many nations, including Australia, a nation often foregrounded as a beacon of multiculturalism in practice. The key assumption underlying these questions is that Islam constrains the full possibilities of citizenship in multicultural secular societies and that Muslims must be actively steered towards participation in civic life. By contrast, this article, based on research with 80 young Australian Muslims from migrant backgrounds reveals how Australian Muslims are enacting everyday citizenship through active, self-driven participation in multicultural civic spaces. This is a process overlooked by contemporary government approaches to the management of Muslim communities and alike. This article argues that is it access to these spaces of everyday interaction rather than an emphasis upon securitisation and civic literacy that fosters the development of citizenship and civic engagement central to the success of Australian multiculturalism. The article provides important considerations for those concerned with the future viability of multicultural policies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]