Alternative Law Journal

Workplace surveillance is becoming increasingly widespread and invasive in Australian workplaces. Drawing on existing empirical literature, this article argues that workplace surveillance poses a significant risk of enabling or enacting discrimination. The article maps how discrimination law might be used to challenge workplace surveillance, and calls for empirical scholarship focused on Australian workers’ experiences to better illuminate the disparate impacts of workplace surveillance.

Set against the backdrop of ongoing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander deaths in custody, this article examines how racism in policing can be revealed through coronial inquest processes. This article provides an in-depth examination of the attempts to do this in two coronial inquests – one being the coronial inquest into the death of Yorta Yorta woman Aunty Tanya Day; the other, the coronial inquest into the death of Warlpiri and Luritja teenager Kumanjayi Walker. This article sets out the significant findings, or lack of findings, of racism made in each inquest, while also highlighting the limitations of the current system. The article also calls for governments to reckon with racism in policing and take action to prevent future Indigenous deaths in custody.

In the 2025 cases of Babet, Ravbar and Farmer, the High Court characterised structured proportionality as a ‘tool of analysis’ that need not be applied expressly or ritualistically in every implied freedom of political communication case. Yet the majority stopped short of clarifying the circumstances in which structured proportionality remains applicable, if at all, and declined to definitively endorse a consistent justification test. This article explores the underappreciated practical costs of doctrinal uncertainty for litigants, lawyers and lower courts, underscoring the need for greater methodological clarity in this area.

On 11 February 2026, some 14 months after Bird v DP (a pseudonym) was handed down, the High Court revisited key questions of liability in historical child abuse cases in AA v Trustees of the Roman Catholic Church for the Diocese of Maitland-Newcastle. These two cases intersect in critical ways, revealing intellectual legal preferences for the determination of liability in this area and have had a significant impact (directly or indirectly) improving the rights of institutional child abuse victims to compensation.