For hydrogen to assist in meeting ambitious decarbonisation goals, national law and policy has a central role. This article presents a critical analysis of Australian law and policy for hydrogen energy, by comparison with selected European jurisdictions. Existing energy policy literature describes divergent paradigms and pathways to hydrogen futures. Australia is a case study of policy conflict over competing methods of hydrogen production and their differing climate change implications.

Co-authors: J. Prest; J. Woodyatt; J.P.J. Pettit.

This paper draws on data collected from ASX 50 listed corporations. As the UNGP makes clear a visible and accessible policy commitment is the most basic form of recognition that corporations can afford to human rights under the schema it offers. The paper takes the position that this policy commitment gives corporations a chance to declare a positive relationship with human rights. The presence or not of a policy statement, and the form that the statement takes, tells us much about the relationship between the corporate sector in Australia and human rights. The data reveals a low prevalence of policy commitment across the largest publically listed corporations in Australia. The paper selects a range of variables against which to examine whether commitment occurs or not.

The most significant factor that supports policy commitment is membership of human rights engaged global Business and Industry Non-Governmental Organisations (BINGOs). We might expect a rather stronger public commitment to human rights reflecting the position apparently taken by Australian corporations on other ESG standards. However this expectation has to be set against the absence of human rights discourse as a political and cultural artefact at the domestic level.

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Methodologically and theoretically innovative, this monograph draws from Marxism and deconstruction bringing together the textual and the material in our understanding of international law. Approaching 'civilisation' as an argumentative pattern related to the distribution of rights and duties amongst different communities, Tzouvala illustrates both its contradictory nature and its pro-capitalist bias. 'Civilisation' is shown to oscillate between two poles. On the one hand, a pervasive 'logic of improvement' anchors legal equality to demands that non-Western polities undertake extensive domestic reforms and embrace capitalist modernity. On the other, an insistent 'logic of biology' constantly postpones and engages such a prospect based on ideas of immutable difference. By detailing the tension and synergies between these two logics, Tzouvala argues that international law incorporates and attempts to mediate the contradictions of capitalism as a global system of production and exchange that both homogenises and stratifies societies, populations and space.

> Offers a fresh perspective to disciplinary debates about legal indeterminacy by showing that the contradictions of 'civilisation' are the way the pro-capitalist bias of international law manifests itself

> Combines methodological tools drawn from Marxism and deconstruction, enabling the reader to take the textuality of the law seriously while also situating these texts within the structures of global capitalism

> Elucidates the role and continuing purchase of racialised and gendered tropes for international legal argumentation and helps its audience decipher the racist and sexist presuppositions of supposedly neutral legal doctrines

The Climate Council recently detailed the adverse health impacts of coal on Australian citizens and their environment. Such reports confirm established evidence that coal mining not only releases atmospheric toxins but destroys prime farming land and rivers. This column examines how the revocation of coal mining leases, after proven corruption by disgraced New South Wales politicians was upheld by the High Court (NuCoal Resources Ltd v New South Wales [2015] HCA 13) was challenged using mechanisms in the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement and potentially the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement. It is likely that foreign investors in the Australian coal mining and fracking industries will circumvent imprecise exceptions and use investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) clauses in the TPP to initiate claims for damages before panels of conflicted investment arbitrators, alleging appropriation of their investments as a result of Australian legislation or policy taken against the coal industry on public health grounds. This issue is explored through analysis drawn from an extant investor-state dispute involving the mining industry in North America.

Note: This article was first published by Thomson Reuters in the Journal of Law and Medicine and should be cited as ‘TA Faunce and S Parikh, NuCoal Resources Ltd v New South Wales: The Mining Industry and Potential Health Impacts of Investor State Dispute Settlement in Australia, 2016, 23, JLM, 801’.

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10 October 2016, the Essendon Football Club (EFC) performance enhancing drugs regulatory saga concluded with the Swiss Federal Tribunal (SFT) deciding not to ‘entertain’ Essendon’s appeal of the Court of Arbitration of Sport (CAS)’s guilty finding, thus supporting the World Anti-Doping Authority (WADA). The EFC CAS appeal is a unique case as it is the first time a team (34 players from the one team) have been subject to CAS’s jurisdiction for allegations of doping contrary to the World Anti-Doping Code. One significant concern throughout this regulatory sage was that the team-based nature of the infraction denied individual players natural justice. Central to these concerns is the fact that the players were advised by EFC to take part in the program and that its chief architect, sports scientist Stephen Dank, never gave sworn evidence that was tested in cross-examination. This column investigates whether there are important lessons for team-based anti-doping infractions from the EFC saga.

This research and evaluation report undertaken by Dr Liz Curran of the Australian National University (pro bono) looks at research over the two years of the life of a family violence project (with base line data collected in a First Phase Report in November 217) examining a Secondary Consultation (SC) service integrated with Training and Outreach program as well as capacity for strategic advocacy.

The Consumer Action Law Centre project (with part funding from the Victorian Department of Justice & Regulation) aims to overcome barriers for people experiencing family violence identified in previous studies. The research findings (detailed in this report) are that legal assistance services, such as this one of the Consumer Action Law Centre, working with trusted community professionals (to whom people experiencing family violence are likely to turn) if done in a holistic, integrated and seamless, respectful way can enable credit & debt legal issues to be addressed in a timely, creative and effective way. It does this by breaking down barriers that exist to those needing legal help. The report provides some universal insights into the plight and impacts of family violence and ways for effective service delivery without ignoring the challenges for both individuals and a variety of services in providing critical support for victim/survivors of family violence and their family.

Since 2011 Myanmar has experienced many changes to its social, political and economic landscape. The formation of a new government in 2016, led by the National League for Democracy, was a crucially important milestone in the country’s transition to a more inclusive form of governance. And yet, for many people everyday struggles remain unchanged, and have often worsened in recent years. Key economic, social and political reforms are stalled, conflict persists and longstanding issues of citizenship and belonging remain.  

The wide-ranging, myriad and multiple challenges of Living with Myanmar is the subject of this volume. Following the Myanmar Update series tradition, each of the authors offers a different perspective on the sociopolitical and economic mutations occurring in the country and the challenges that still remain. The book is divided into six sections and covers critical issues ranging from gender equality and identity politics, to agrarian reform and the representative role of parliament. Collectively, these voices raise key questions concerning the institutional legacies of military rule and their ongoing role in subverting the country’s reform process. However, they also offer insights into the creative and productive ways that Myanmar’s activists, civil society, parliamentarians, bureaucrats and everyday people attempt to engage with and reform those legacies.

The Philippine left’s short-lived association with the government of Rodrigo Duterte from 2016 vexed political observers, whether sympathetic to or critical of the left. Against the charge that the left was simply subordinated as a political force to Duterte’s multi-class populist-cum-fascist project, this article argues that the left was both friend and foe of Duterte, who promised an aggressive War on Drugs as well as socioeconomic reforms. It situates the left–Duterte relationship within the history of engagement by new political actors with elite democracy in the Philippines since 1987. The friend-and-foe or dual strategy analysis uncovers some of the richness of the left’s progressive engagement with Duterte. This contributes to an understanding of Philippine political history by providing a profile of progressive engagement involving a set of actors different from those who have previously been analysed – viz. national democrats rather than social democrats – and an increasingly authoritarian administration explicitly espousing anti-human rights rhetoric. We specify the conditions for the emergence of the left–Duterte relationship, how it unfolded, and the tipping points that led to its collapse. The findings underscore the complexities and extreme difficulty of transforming Philippine politics through progressive engagement.

This essay argues that representations of public space both illustrate concepts of governance in visual terms, and actively constitute, through image, those modes. Starting from images of public space in Lorenzetti and Hobbes, the author moves to consider contemporary representations of public space under the influence of neoliberalism. A particular focus is place on video games as constitutive of relations to the public realm, space and order. A sub theme of the essay is the role of pandemics in how we constitute a vision of the public realm. Lorenzetti, Hobbes, and neoliberalism can both be seen as having been profoundly influenced by concepts and varieties of disease.