Event: Tuesday 23 October 2018 @ 6pm – A world without privacy – Australia’s role in an international privacy crisis

Posted by on


Dear Members and Friends of the AIIA QLD,

IMPORTANT: Please note a venue for this event has not been finalised. Members will be notified as soon as a location is confirmed. We urge members to register as this is a high-profile event on a major issue. Queensland Privacy Commissioner Philip Green is one of the panelists. You will note that the website lists the offices of Holding Redlich Lawyers as the venue. Please disregard this. It will be corrected when the new venue is known

Our next event is scheduled for TUESDAY the 23rd of October 2018, at 6 for 6:30pm. There will be a big turnout for this event. Please register by clicking here:  https://aiiaqld.tidyhq.com/public/schedule/events/21569-a-world-without-privacy-australia-s-role-in-an-international-privacy-crisis

All events are free for AIIA members. Non-members are welcome and can pay $15 (or $10 for student non-members) online while registering. Or they can pay at the door on the night. Drinks are available for purchase at the event, as well as copies of our latest policy commentary (which are free for our members). Details on all events for this month are available on our website and our Facebook page.

A world without privacy – Australia’s role in an international privacy crisis

An AIIA Qld Conversations event with Queensland Privacy Commissioner Philip Green, Angus Murray, and Dr Monique Mann

With the rise of social media platforms, digital profiles, transactions and subscriptions, an individuals’ data footprint is constantly expanding. Who owns that data? Is privacy a reality? And is Australian regulation tough enough? Both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights recognise privacy as a fundamental human right. But are these conventions being undermined by a data driven economy and international security concerns. If so, what is the effect of this? Will a loss of privacy equal a loss of autonomy?

With Australia’s privacy legislation under review and consideration, we seek to discuss the effects this will have on the world’s perceptions on Australia’s relationship with privacy. In light of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) setting the ‘golden standard’ on privacy, does Australia continue to lag behind? Join us for a conversation in which we discuss these important questions and more.

About our speakers

Philip Green was appointed to the position of Privacy Commissioner, Office of the Information Commissioner in December 2015. Philip has worked in many different Queensland Government roles and in private practice throughout his career.  Prior to his appointment as Privacy Commissioner, he was Executive Director, Small Business – Department of Tourism, Major Events, Small Business and the Commonwealth Games and has held this role since 2008.  He was responsible for leading Innovation Policy and Innovation Partnerships and Services and Office of Small Business Teams in the delivery of high level policy development, program management, service delivery and advice. Philip holds degrees in law and arts (with economic minor) and was admitted as a solicitor of the Supreme Court of Queensland and High Court of Australia in February 1992. As the Privacy Commissioner Philip actively promotes and champions privacy rights and responsibilities in Queensland. In his role as Privacy Commissioner, Philip leads the staff in OIC responsible for mediating privacy complaints which have not been resolved with the Queensland Government agency involved; conducting reviews and audits of privacy compliance; giving compliance notices for serious, flagrant or recurring breaches of the privacy principles; and waiving or modifying an agency’s privacy obligations for a particular purpose or project.

Angus Murray is a practising solicitor and human rights advocate. He is a Vice President of the Queensland Council for Civil Liberties, the Chair of Electronic Frontiers Australia’s Policy and Research Committee and a Partner and Trade Marks Attorney at Irish Bentley Lawyers. He is also a co-founder and national director of The Legal Forecast and a professional member of Australian Lawyers for Human Rights. He holds a Master of Laws from Stockholm University and his academic work has focused on the interaction between the right to privacy and the enforcement of intellectual property law.

Dr Monique Mann is the Vice Chancellor’s Research Fellow in Technology and Regulation at the Faculty of Law, Queensland University of Technology. She is a member of: The Crime, Justice and Social Democracy Research Centre (CJSDRC) at QUT Law; The Intellectual Property and Innovation Law (IPIL) Research Program at QUT Law; The International Law and Global Governance (ILGG) Research Program at QUT Law, and; The Digital Media Research Centre (DMRC) at QUT Creative Industries Faculty. Dr Mann is advancing a program of socio-legal research on the intersecting topics of algorithmic justice, police technology, surveillance, and transnational online policing. She is on the Board of Directors of the Australian Privacy Foundation.

 

 

New research on what we know about small time ‘social’ drug dealers

Posted on

What do we know about drug dealers? And how should the law deal with them? These issues are discussed in ABC Radio National’s weekly Law Report.

In the interview, Professor John Scott, from the Centre for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, discusses his recently published research in the International Journal of Drug Policy, exploring how eleven different countries deal with low end drug dealers or ‘social suppliers’.

This follows a previous study, two years ago, of interviews with two hundred small scale cannabis sellers around Australia.

Social supply of cannabis in Australia

For more, listen to the interview.

COAG Summit on Reducing Violence against Women

Posted by on

CJSDRC Associate Professor Michael Flood contributed to the opening panel of the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) Summit on Reducing Violence against Women and their Children. The two-day summit, held over October 2-3 in Adelaide, was an invitation-only event for policy-makers, researchers, advocates, and service providers in the violence sector. The COAG Summit is intended to feed into the development of the fourth and final action plan of the National Plan to Reduce Violence against Women and their Children 2010-2022.

In the opening panel, facilitated by Natasha Stott Despoja, Dr Flood provided a stocktake of contemporary efforts in Australia to prevent domestic and sexual violence. He began with a reminder of what ‘primary prevention’ is: changing the social conditions that support and promote violence against women and children, to prevent initial perpetration and victimisation. Prevention is aimed at changing structures, norms, and practices (and is not focused only on attitudes or only on individuals and their behaviours). Flood noted that some prevention strategies are well developed: respectful relationships education in schools (although delivery is very uneven across Australia), communications and social marketing, and comprehensive approaches in some settings such as sports and media. On the other hand, there is in government policy insufficient attention to gender inequalities as drivers of violence against women, and some policies indeed entrench these inequalities. Few efforts are comprehensive (that is, using multiple strategies in multiple settings with multiple audiences). Few efforts involve substantial community engagement. There has been a greater focus on domestic and family violence and a neglect of sexual violence and sexual harassment. Strategies that are under-developed include community development and community mobilisation, respectful relationships education in other contexts such as universities, and work to erode structural gender inequalities.

Associate Professor Michael Flood briefly outlined what is needed in Australian prevention policy. This includes:

* A more defined focus on primary prevention in the Fourth Action Plan;
*  National coordination, whether through a ‘primary prevention hub’ or national coordination body or network.;
*  Sustainability, including sustained funding;
*  Scaling up;
*  Knowledge sharing, through some kind of national clearinghouse or hub;
*  Training and capacity building, to build an expert workforce for prevention;
*  Greater attention to sexual violence and sexual harassment;
*  The active policy promotion of gender equality, including through gender-responsive policies and budgeting;
*  Feminist advocacy, including contributions to, and consultation on, policy and programming;
*  Measures of progress, particularly of efforts to shift the gender inequalities which drive violence against women; and
*  Long term commitment, through a second National Plan.

(Please email Michael Flood if you wish to see a more detailed version of these comments.)

Launch of report on attitudes to gender in Australia

Posted by on

CJSDRC member, Associate Professor Michael Flood spoke at the launch of a new report on attitudes to gender in Australia. The report, From Girls to Men: Social attitudes to gender equality in Australia, involved a national survey of over 2,100 people in Australia aged 16 and over, and was launched at Old Parliament House, Canberra, on September 5.

Author and commentator Clementine Ford facilitated a panel comprising Dr Jessa Rogers (UNE); Associate Professor Michael Flood (QUT); Ashleigh Streeter (COO Jasiri); and Michael Livingstone (Jesuit Social Services). Flood and others at the event noted that while there is widespread awareness among women and men of gender inequalities in Australia, there is also among men in particular a troubling emphasis on how men have been ‘forgotten’ in or excluded from measures to improve gender equality.

Director – Crime, Justice and Social Democracy Research Centre

Posted by on

QUT Crime, Justice and Social Democracy Research Centre Director, Professor Reece Walters will be departing QUT to take up a leadership role at Deakin University. Reece’s last day will be Friday 12 October.

Reece has been with QUT for seven years, during which time he has made significant leadership contributions to the School and Faculty, first as ADR and more recently as Director of the CJSDRC. His collegiality, friendship and support will be missed by staff in the Faculty and School.   Reece will continue on as an Adjunct Professor to the School, so our association with him will continue when he takes up his new role.

We are pleased to advise that Professor Melissa Bull will be taking up the role as Director, Crime, Justice and Social Democracy Research Centre from 29 October 2018.  Melissa was recently appointed as a Professor to the School of Justice and as previously reported, Melissa is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Griffith University. Her two main areas of research include drug regulation and policing diversity. Her work involves theoretically informed analysis of policy and its translation in to practice in different contexts. Recently this has extended to comparative criminological investigation that considers how various criminal justice responses to offending behaviour translate across differently organised states. Melissa’s current research projects include work that focuses on harm reduction and drug law reform in China and Australia, as well as a project with colleagues from the University of Queensland that explores new ways of thinking about policing in Pacific Island states.

Melissa has published widely on drug regulation and drug control, sentencing and punishment, long term immigration detention, community policing and diversity, counter terrorism narratives and prevention programs, and gender violence in Pacific island states. While at Griffith University she has held a number of research leadership roles, including Deputy Director and then Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Policing and Security (2012-15). Since 2016 she has been the leader of the Justice, Law and Society research program in the Griffith Criminology Institute.

We look forward to welcoming Melissa in her new role, and we wish Reece all the very best in his future endeavours.

 

Public Lecture: Human Rights in Queensland and Beyond

Posted by on

Crime, Justice and Social Democracy Research Centre member and Australian Privacy Foundation Board member Dr Monique Mann organised a large public lecture on the topic of Human Rights in Queensland and Beyond. Professor George Williams AO, Dean and Anthony Mason Professor of Law at the University of NSW, joined the QUT Faculty of Law to deliver a keynote lecture examining a range of issues relating to human rights in Australia and internationally.

This event was co-hosted with a range of community, legal and government partners including: Human Rights Act for Queensland Campaign, Australian Privacy Foundation, Australian Lawyers for Human Rights, Queensland Council for Civil Liberties and Office of the Information Commissioner Queensland.

Professor Williams discussed the current state of human rights (or lack thereof) in Australia, the process and challenges associated with the development, implementation and enforcement of human rights charters, and most importantly, how a Queensland Human Rights Act would affect Queenslanders and Australians more broadly.

Following the lecture, a diverse panel of experts reflected on the importance of a Human Rights Act in their specific domain. The panellists included:

•             Ms Aimee McVeigh, Human Rights for QLD Campaign

•             Mr Shane Duffy, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Service QLD

•             Ms Karyn Walsh, Micah Projects

•             Mr Phil Green, QLD Privacy Commissioner

•             Dr Bridget Lewis, QUT Faculty of Law

The event and discussion around this topic is particularly relevant following the Palaszczuk Government’s election commitment in early 2018 to introduce a Human Rights Act in Queensland. It is anticipated that the Palaszczuk Government will release a draft of the Queensland Human Rights Act in the near future.

The lecture attracted over 150 community, government and academic representatives. Philip Green, QLD Privacy Commissioner and panelist, found the discussion highly rewarding and shared his experience of the event: “I believe the discussion will be of tremendous benefit as Queensland embarks on public debate of a draft bill and as Australia debates some very concerning legislative

New Book: Southern Criminology by Kerry Carrington, Russell Hogg, John Scott, Maximo Sozzo and Reece Walters

Posted by on

Southern Criminology By Kerry Carrington, Russell Hogg, John Scott, Máximo Sozzo and Reece Walters, just published! (Routledge, London and New York)

Criminology has focused mainly on problems of crime and violence in the large population centres of the Global North to the exclusion of the global countryside, peripheries and antipodes. Southern criminology is an innovative new approach that seeks to correct this bias. It is not a new sub-discipline within criminology, but rather a journey toward cognitive justice.

This book turns the origin stories of criminology upsidedown. It traces criminology’s orientalist  fascination with dangerous masculinities back to Lombroso’s theory of atavism.  It uncovers the colonial legacy of criminal justice,  best exemplified by the over-incarceration of Indigenous peoples.   It analyses the ways in which discourses about punishment have simply assumed that forms of penality roll out from the Global North to the rest of the world. It  advances the case that although the major drivers of eco-crime and  global warming come from the Global North, their most harmful impacts are felt in the Global South. The book also explores how the coloniality of gender shapes distinctive patterns of violence in the Global South.

Reviews

“A thought provoking book! Written by the leaders of Southern Criminology, it is a most important contribution that addresses the issue of North-South imbalance in the production of criminological knowledge. The book powerfully challenges the assumed universality of dominant criminology theories and explains how contemporary criminology knowledge has been highly limited by Western experiences.”

– Professor Jianhong Liu, Department of Sociology, University of Macau

“Southern Criminology takes the reader on a journey of critical imagination to offer a future landscape for the discipline of criminology. This journey is challenging and profound. The authors chart a route from the discipline’s past to the promise of a dawn for its future that anyone willing to travel with them will find intellectually valuable and hugely rewarding. Take a risk. Take this journey. You will not be disappointed.”

– Professor Sandra Walklate, Eleanor Rathbone Chair of Sociology, University of Liverpool and Editor in Chief of the British Journal of Criminology

“For most of its existence, criminology has been moulded by the intellectual perspectives and ideological reflexes of the global North—a region that contains only a fraction of the world’s population and only a fraction of its experience of violence and social harm. Southern Criminology promises to be a foundational document in a growing movement to bring the rest of the world into the centre of criminological dialogue and action.”

– Professor Elliott Currie, Department of Criminology, Law and Society, University of California Irvine

“This book is an inspiring project of retrieval of wisdom bubbling up from marginality and domination in global structures of social relations. The ideas retrieved bridge global divides rather than essentialize ‘North’ or ‘South’. Dialogue across diverse divides helps build new intercultural and interscalar understandings in a pathbreaking volume.”

– Professor John Braithwaite, RegNet, ANU

“This book presents a convincing argument about the need to develop a Southern Criminology to overcome the monopolization of criminology by the Northern part of the world. It leaves us well informed on important issues, especially on the richness and pertinence of incorporating Southern perspectives into the Global understanding of crime and violence. Far from trying to discredit the knowledge produced by Northern Criminology, this book proves a simple fact: that we can learn from each other, and that knowledge can travel from Global South to North, South to South, East to West and vice versa.”

– Professor Elena Azaola, Mexican Criminologist, del Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social, CIESAS

Mark Wynn: Sexual Assault – Myths and Misconceptions

Posted by on
Mark Wynn: Sexual Assault – Myths and Misconceptions
3 October 10-11 a.m.
in person at CQU Brisbane Campus 160 Ann Street, Brisbane QLD 4000
or live-streamed
Free but registration is required
Fulbright Specialist Mark Wynn is a leading police trainer who has lectured at universities and police academies throughout the world. He draws upon his extensive experience in law enforcement and his knowledge of family violence; stalking; domestic violence and sexual violence. He has also worked a consultant and an advisor to government departments, providing strategies to prevent domestic violence and support in the development of policy and training curriculum for law enforcement.

Research scholarship round closing soon!

Posted by on

Interested in undertaking higher degree research for a PhD or Masters with the School of Justice at QUT? It’s not too late to get an application in before the scholarship round ends on 30 September 2018.

We are currently looking to supervise students in our areas of expertise:

  • Southern Criminology
  • Activism and Social Change
  • Gender, Sexuality and Violence
  • Policing, Diversity and Society
  • Technologies and Digital Justice

Learn more about the Crime, Justice and Social Democracy Research Centre and our research strengths

See what School of Justice Academics have been publishing

Find out more about higher degree research and the current scholarship round

CSIRO Data61 Live Conference

Posted by on

On Tuesday the 18th of September Crime, Justice and Social Democracy Research Centre member Dr Monique Mann spoke at the CSIRO Data61Live conference. Data61Live is Australia’s premier science and technology event. More than 2,000 people registered to attend the event from corporates, SMEs and start-ups, universities, government and schools. Dr Mann spoke about some of the different ways forward (i.e. law, regulation, policy, design) for making the most out of big data while protecting privacy and preserving trust in new technologies.