I recently spoke on a panel of three at the second annual Australian Progressive Legal Studies Conference. The theme of the conference was ‘Law and Class in the 21st Century: Australia and Beyond.’
The roundtable comprised Scarlet Wilcock (University of Sydney Law School), Asher Wolf (independent activist) and me. It was focused on robodebt. The text of my address is below.

On 2 August 2023, the Commonwealth Ombudsman published a terse report outlining its findings after an investigation into the lawfulness of ‘income apportioning’ — a method of debt calculation used by Australian welfare agencies DHS and DSS since at least 2003 (ie, for more than 17 years). As the Report states, this process, as it […]

The following post explores the relative egregiousness of the robodebt scandal, the Royal Commission report’s structure and contents, and the earliest stage at which the capability of creating something like robodebt arose. It also considers automated decision-making and the extent to which the Commission omits to consider the actual technical workings of robodebt.

The post goes on to consider the problem of subject matter experts, as well as the problem of the ‘proof point’ solution for robodebt, both of which are not considered in the Commission’s report. Next, the post notes the way in which the Commission’s report does not take a strict or legalistic approach to the unlawfulness of robodebts — at least not beyond anything already said in the Federal Court of Australia.

Finally, the post briefly touches on the AAT firing scandals that the Report essentially omits. Despite all this, the article concludes with some compliments for what is obviously an exceptional output from this Royal Commission — one that chronicles an unprecedented Australian governance failure and recommends 57 ways it might be redressed.

The proposed ACT approval model Recently, I was interviewed by the young journalistic team at SIX News Australia about a Bill that the ACT Government introduced into its single-house Parliament in late March 2023. As I see it, the proposed Bill, if passed, will be transformative. And in a good way. It will require interventions […]

In November I delivered two conference papers. I summarise them below.

Mainstream critical legal education in Australia gives little attention to enactments and case law regulating the Commonwealth’s constitutional power to appropriate (s 81) and spend money (s 83). This neglect has several causes, including a shallow knowledge base. Few legal scholars have engaged with reforms aimed at increasing the public administration of government spending, much […]

This post is a provisional opinion, expressed in a moment in time. It does not represent the view of my employer. Nor is it legal advice. It is also not offered as a scholarly contribution. Recently, Bernie Fraser has said he’d prefer the ACTU Secretary Sally McManus be appointed to review the RBA over an […]

Overruling Roe and Casey I’m very disappointed by the result of Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The majority holding of the SCOTUS opinion (authored by Justice Alito) is summarised in the headnote as follows: The Constitution does not confer a right to abortion; Roe and Casey are overruled; and the authority to regulate abortion […]

In short, because the texts don’t constitute ‘advertising.’

In the late nineteenth century, Sigmund Freud’s colleague Wilhelm Fleiss successfully diagnosed an illness in one of Freud’s relatives, without even having met them. Freud was so impressed by Fleiss’s “diagnostic acumen” that he went on to advocate the method in certain circumstances. Freud would write that diagnosing someone without personally examining them was acceptable […]

Freud, Fliess and the clinical consultation At the turn of the twentieth century, Sigmund Freud and his otolaryngologist friend Wilhelm Fleiss parted ways in bitter disagreement. The men’s vexation arose before a lethiferous background of cocaine use and abuse, and was ultimately ended by that same route, with the pair discovering they had developed a difference […]

Fisher’s critique of capitalist realism Although a few books, numerous essays, an art movement, a literary tradition, and an ideology have all been given the title “Capitalist Realism,” it is likely that what first springs to mind when a cultural studies scholar hears those two words is a small book published in 2009. More than six years since its publication, that […]