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(2007)Journal ArticleIn 1997, the Wood Royal Commission into the New South Wales Police Service concluded that a state of `systemic and entrenched corruption' existed in the police organization. Major reforms were introduced in the wake of the Commission, including the appointment of a new Police Commissioner, organizational restructuring, a complete revamp of recruit education, as well as increased monitoring and accountability. The magnitude and scope of the Commission's reform programme was bold and ambitious by international standards. This article takes stock of the impact of the Commission 10 years after the publication of its Final Report. Drawing on interviews with key informants, official reports and other documentary sources, the article analyses the activities of the Commission, the intentions of its recommendations and the implementation and consequences of reform. The lessons of the NSW experience are salutary not only for understanding the vagaries of police reform, they also demonstrate the complex relationship between police organizations and the volatile political environments in which they increasingly need to operate.
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(2007)Journal ArticleThis article suggests that the processes for establishing a more coherent approach to Indigenous law and order are being put in place, however, these gains need to be defended and supported against the renewed ascendancy of a discourse of barbarism and primitivism about Indigenous people within current federal policies.
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(2011)Journal ArticleUnited Nation’s conventions exist to help facilitate and protect vulnerable people’s human rights: including people with disabilities (Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, 2006) and children (Convention on the Rights of the Child, 1989). However, for some families where a family member has a disability, there may be inherent conflicts in meeting stand-alone human rights’ conventions. These conventions should work together to ensure that young people with disabilities and challenging behaviour and their parents and siblings all have equal rights to full participation in social, economic and civic life. Yet service system deficits mean that this is not always the case. This paper argues that governments need to provide a whole of family and community support approach to ensure the human rights of all family members are met. This is a complex ethical, moral and human rights issue that needs addressing by disability scholars and the disability community.
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(2008)Journal ArticleAboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Services (ATSILS) play a crucial role in the representation of Indigenous defendants. Given the fraught relationship of Aboriginal people with the criminal justice system and the legal systme in general, and the ever-deepening criss of over-representation, adequate resourcing of these services is an extremely important administration of justice issue. This article looks at the nature of the demands and extent of the workload of ATSILS, especially in comparison to Legal Aid Commissions. It argues that the static funding environment that ATSILS operate in results in compromised capacity to provide adequate services to the sector of the population that arguably needs the best possible legal services.
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(2005)Journal ArticleThis article is largely prompted by the two recently promulgated regulations governing takeovers in China. The goal of this article is to critically examine the legal takeover regime in China and to put forward proposals for reform. To outline the discussion, Part II describes the stock market, the takeover law, and the takeover activities in China. Two legislative goals, namely contestability of takeovers and shareholder protection, are set out in Part III. Under these principles, Part IV and Part V explore the issues of tender offer and anti takeover defenses, respectively. Specifically, Part IV focuses on information disclosure and other major rules relating to takeovers. It appears that these rules are in line with the international norm and acceptably workable in the context of China. Furthermore, Part V explores the serious problems that are associated with anti-takeover defenses. China's law seems to be both over inclusive and under inclusive in this respect. After an in depth comparative analysis of the legal regimes in the U.S., UK, and Australia, it is apparent that those regimes are not suitable for China's local conditions. Lastly, this article proposes a regime in which shareholders could veto the use of takeover defenses ex post, while requiring that certain defensive measures be decided ex ante. This proposal could well suit China's needs because it not only gives shareholders sufficient protection, but also preserves necessary flexibility for management to efficiently respond to truly undesirable tender offers.
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(2006)Journal ArticleThe object of this article is to examine the recent legal reforms to the Company Law and the Securities Law of the People’s Republic of China. These reforms have made a number of substantial changes to these two laws, bringing them more closely into line with their counterparts in more developed economies. Despite many commendable achievements, these law reforms are however not without some problems. Nevertheless, it is argued here that the impact of these reforms on China’s economic development will be profound and that they will provide an excellent basis for further reforms in this area.
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(2006)Journal ArticleDetermining the proper class of plaintiffs that might be allowed to sue an insider trader for damages has been a very difficult task. The article will first discuss the development of three main approaches to the issue, namely the privity approach, the contemporaneous trader approach and the nondisclosure-period trader approach. This is followed by a detailed discussion of who are the individual investors specifically harmed by insider trading, since the scope of potential plaintiffs is inherently related to the issues of causation and harm. It is recommended that the nondisclosure-period trader approach properly reflects the nature of harm caused by insider trading and eliminates the uncertainty of determining who qualifies as a plaintiff. Moreover, in order to avoid potential excessive damages due to the large number of plaintiffs under this approach, caps must be provided to limit the damages to some multiple of defendant’s illicit gains, depending on how far private suits are intended to serve a deterrent purpose.
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(2005)Journal ArticleThe purpose of this article is to critically examine Chinas insider trading regulation, and based upon the results of such examination, set out reform proposals for China. With the benefit of overseas experience, in a relatively short period of time, China has made a remarkable achievement in setting up its insider trading regulatory regime. There are, however, some serious problems with the Chinese law, due to the uncritical implantation of the ideas from foreign sources. This is strikingly illustrated by the loopholes in the definition of insiders which are inherently related to the confusion around the underlying theory of insider trading liability. The article first broadly describes the background of the regulation of insider trading in China, and then offers a detailed discussion of its content. Based on this, a critique of Chinas insider trading regulation is carried out. It appears that China has hastily imported two conflicting insider trading theories, namely the equality of access theory and the fiduciary-duty-based theories which include the classical theory and the misappropriation theory. A careful analysis suggests that the equality of access theory is preferable to the fiduciary-duty-based theories, especially in the context of China. It is further submitted that the Australian information connection only approach to the definition of insiders is both theoretically justifiable and practically manageable, and thus should be introduced to reform Chinas insider trading regulation.
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(2008)Journal ArticleThis article examines the recently promulgated takeover regulation by the China Securities Regulatory Commission. Along with other laws and regulations, this new regulation has greatly enhanced China’s takeover legal regime both in terms of form and substance. It came at time when the Chinese economy is undergoing a strategic restructuring process and China’s capital markets are at the birth of a new era thanks to the ongoing state share reform. The new regulation brings China’s takeover law more closely into line with its counterparts in more developed economies, but it remains to be seen whether it will function in practice as hoped due to some potential problems with the regime. The article investigates the implications of the new regulation for takeover activities in China, and conducts a critique of China’s takeover legal regime from a comparative perspective.
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(2007)Journal ArticleThe purpose of this journal article is twofold. First, it provides a discussion of the use of recidivism as a measure of effectiveness of criminal justice interventions, and, secondly, there is discussion of an evaluation of a juvenile post-release support program. The article argues that there has been a significant growth in recidivist studies, particularly as a measure of effectiveness. However there has been less and less attention placed on the limitations of measures of recidivism, or the nature of extraneous factors that influence re-offending. We use an evaluation study we conducted of the Post Release Support Program (PRSP) for juvenile offenders in New South Wales to explore these issues further. One of the interesting points to the study was that, while the statistical results on re-offending were not conclusive, the qualitative interviews among staff and offenders were overwhelmingly positive about the program. For us this raises the question: what value do we place on recidivism in evaluating a program when qualitative outcome information appears more conclusive?