John Baker’s story of the collection of wines that once belonged to Nicholas II, the last Tsar of Russia, and was controlled by and supplemented by Joseph Stalin, the Soviet strong man who ran Russia from 1924 to his death in 1953, took a long time in the telling. The earliest scenes, in which John...Read More

In Helmbright v Minister for Immigration, Citizenship, Migrant Services and Multicultural Affairs (No 3) [2021] FCA 955, Mortimer J ordered each party bear its own costs of proceedings in which a New Zealand citizen of Australian Aboriginal descent unsuccessfully sought a declaration that he was not an alien for the purposes of section 51(xix) of...Read More

In 2015 the Abbott government established what it said was a fast-track asylum seeker process to deal with around 30,000 individuals from Afghanistan and other countries and who were not detained in offshore facilities like Manus Island and Nauru. It is called the Independent Assessment Authority (IAA) and its role is to deal with cases...Read More