Can a creditor with a debt which would not be provable in a bankruptcy nonetheless present a creditor’s petition based on a failure to pay that non-provable debt? The Federal Court of Australia squarely considered this question for the first time in Australian Securities and Investment Commission v King [2021] FCA 1610, a decision of...Read More

The High Court’s recent decision in Sunland Group Limited v Gold Coast City Council [2021] HCA 35 (Sunland), delivered on 10 November 2021, has important implications for the interpretation of statutory approvals under a wide range of legislation, including approvals under planning laws. In Sunland, Stewart J (with whom Kiefel CJ, Keane and Gleeson JJ...Read More

Higgins Chambers warmly congratulates Ruth O’Gorman QC on her appointment as silk.Read More

An intellectually disabled man on death row in Singapore has won another short reprieve, but the global campaign to save him is growing. An intellectually impaired Malaysian man due to be executed in Singapore on Wednesday gained a last-minute reprieve as a result of contracting COVID-19. Nagaenthran Dharmalingam’s final legal bid to prevent being hanged...Read More

After a pandemic response that required incursions on some human rights, the threat of governments expanding these powers further is high. Why is it that no one seems to have identified the irony in the right of the Australian political and media class suddenly becoming enamoured of human rights protections, when faced with responses to...Read More

The Full Federal Court recently unanimously allowed an appeal involving whether a Minister had formed the “required state of satisfaction” before making a decision about whether or not to revoke the, otherwise, automatic cancellation of a permanent resident’s visa based on  the character test under section 501 of the Migration Act 1958 (Cth). The decision,...Read More

The death penalty is a form of punishment that has been condemned internationally. Many see it as an abuse of human rights with activists waging a decades long war against governments to see it eradicated from society. Many executions have involved prisoners with severe mental health conditions. Criminal justice systems around the world have stigmatised...Read More

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