LGBT Justice with Nicholas Stewart

>> Jane: All right I've noticed that it's just after six o'clock and we do want to try to keep to time tonight because some people have events on at seven o'clock. I'd like to start by just welcoming everyone tonight and this is our sixth Brennan Justice Talk series and tonight we'll be focusing on LGBTQI justice issues. My name is Jane Wangmann and I am one of the co-directors of the Brennan Justice and Leadership Program here in the faculty of Law at UTS. I'm joined tonight by a few key members of our Brennan team. I have Mark Samuel who is standing in for my fellow co-director from the law student Society Erika Serrano, Professor Leslie Hitchens who is the dean of the faculty of law, Maxine Evans our associate Dean education, Eleanor Tong our law alumni team member, Crystal McLoughlin our brand administrator, Paul Redmond our former co-director and most importantly our special alumni guest and presenter this evening Nicholas Stewart. Tonight we have the unique pleasure of not only having our UTS law students here tonight but also our UTS law alumni, all who are passionate about social justice issues. Before we start the proceedings, I'd like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we are sitting and participating in this learning session. I am coming to you from the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation and I pay my respects to their elders past and present. I acknowledge that some of you might be coming from other traditional lands and I acknowledge those traditional elders as well. I'd also like to extend a very warm welcome to any Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders who are in the room participating in this session tonight. Before I introduce our guest speaker, I just have a couple of housekeeping items to just make sure that we're on top of everything for the event. First up, this Zoom session is being recorded for teaching and learning and event purposes. Only the key speakers and those people that ask questions will be recorded in any recording of this session. As you were probably aware by now having been in many Zoom events over the last half of the year, each of you have the ability to hide your camera, show your camera, as well as mute and unmute your microphone. We do ask that you mute your microphone when you are not speaking to prevent any background noise distracting the speakers and if your bandwidth allows and you feel comfortable doing so, it would be great if you could have your camera on particularly when you're asking a question. This does make it feel like a more interactive event and it's great to see friendly faces. If you do have your camera on and you're finding that it's freezing, just hide your camera and it might free up some bandwidth for you. Lastly for those of you who are Brennan students, could you please enter your full name as it appears in the UTS system in the chat box so that we can record your participation for ROJ points. To all members of the audience tonight, you can also use the chat box to ask questions and we will also have ample time at the end of this session for you to ask questions directly with our speaker. So now after all that housekeeping is settled, it's my great pleasure to introduce to you our guest speaker tonight Nicholas Stewart. Nicholas is one of our UTS alumni graduating with his law degree in 2009. He's a partner at the Out, Loud and Proud Dowson Turco lawyers which is a boutique and prominent LGBTI law firm based in Newtown here in Sydney. Prior to this position, he worked at Mintor Ellison and Singtel Optus. He has appeared before the Australian Crime Commission, the Children's Court of New South Wales, the District Court of New South Wales and the Federal Court of Australia. Nicholas has also appeared in prominent constitutional and human rights cases before the High Court of Australia. Nicholas is known for his successful prosecution of a large discrimination case brought by four gay police officers who suffered homosexual discrimination while employees at the New South Wales police force. He is also the lawyer for Alan Rosendale, a gay bashing victim of the 1980s who believes his assaulters were part of an organised group of law enforcement members who engaged in systematic gay bashings during that time. Nicholas has a long-standing and strong commitment to social justice issues. In 2009, he was awarded the Elizabeth Hastings Memorial Han Rights Award and the UTS Law Alumni Association prize after many years of working on social justice in east Sydney. In 2018, Nicholas also received the UTS Community Alumni Award. Nicholas is a public interest litigation chair and executive at Australian lawyers for human rights and a member of the diversity and inclusion committee at the Law Society of New South Wales. Nicholas is also in his spare time, vice president of the new theatre in Newtown Australia's second oldest Community Theatre. Nicholas was a leading advocate for the New South Wales legislative council's inquiry into gay and transgender hate crimes that took place between 1970 and 2010 in New South Wales. This inquiry commenced in October 2019, it has been receiving submissions all this year and hearings will start to take place in November. Tonight, Nicholas is going to cover a wide range of justice issues that face the LGBTI community here in Australia and it's a great pleasure to have Nicholas here as our Justice Talks keynote tonight and have such a large and interested audience here to hear and speak. So over to you Nicholas.

>> Nicholas: Thank you so much Jane for that lovely introduction. Thank you everyone for joining us tonight. I'm going to share my screen now and just bring up some slides which I will talk to but I imagine that there's going to be a lot that you'll want to know after and you might want to ask questions and that's probably the best time for me to go into issues that I haven't covered. There are quite a few slides here and in that respect I might move fast so if there are questions you want to ask or issues that you have in anything I've talked about, just make a note and then that way you can raise that later in the session. You should all now see my slides and I'm going to start the slideshow. So as Jane mentioned, I am a partner at an Out Loud LGBT Law Firm Dowson Turco. I joined the firm 10 years ago as a partner after years working as a corporate lawyer and I think I was drawn to the firm because I had this inner passion for the LGBT community and I really wanted to work with humans and problem solve. I love my work at Mintor Ellison and I often wonder what my life would have been like if I'd stayed there but this was my calling and I've really you know I've always put into life what I want out of life in that respect this firm has really been the vehicle for that. It's allowed me to take charge of my career and take on matters that are really interesting to me but also to help the community. I'm on LinkedIn and my firm often advertisers paralegal positions and lawyer positions on LinkedIn so I would encourage you all to connect with me on LinkedIn. I like to share stuff on LinkedIn I think it's a great platform for lawyers and people in the community share interesting articles and also learn about each other. You would often you know you'll build a network and you'll often be surprised as to where your friends and colleagues from the University are going and I think LinkedIn is a great platform for that because it isn't Twitter it is in a place where people attack each other. It's generally a professional space where you can share interesting ideas and connect with people who may be useful to you in the future so please don't hesitate to connect with me. My firm is known for all kinds of raisins and Jane mentioned some of them including that New South Wales police case. I'm not going to speak much about the police case in my slides but I'll be happy to in the questions at the end because that case was an enormous case and having come from corporate law where I've acted in large-scale litigation in the Federal Court involving billions of dollars of claims, I have to say that that litigation for those four Gay police officers was the biggest I've ever been in. It took a huge toll on them as litigants and it took a huge toll on me as a lawyer for them and I'm happy to say that we won that case and we won it quite well, but it really took it out of me and I'm not sure I'll do it again. A few years back, the firm also took on a Friends with Benefits case involving a same-sex couple who I shouldn't say a couple of same-sex partnership that was primarily sexual, there was no sharing of a life together there was no romance so to speak and when the parties broke up, the poorer party sought to make a claim that the parties were in fact in a de facto relationship and brought property proceedings and we ran an argument that they were effectively you know Friends with Benefits arrangement. There wasn't a marriage, there wasn't a de facto relationship and we won that case and that was one of the first cases of that kind in the Federal Circuit Court and out of its time was a landmark but there's been plenty since then. Sorry let's go back. I also represented Jessie Willesse, he's the son of Terry Willesse a former Current Affairs host in the USA. Jessie is an advocate for decriminalisation of marijuana and  in his words 'blazed a joint on the steps of town hall' while inviting the media to come and watch him smoke marijuana in a protest against the criminalisation of drugs. He was arrested and charged with administering a prohibited substance I represented him in the Local Court in what was quite a significant set of proceedings because it was the public use of drugs in a protest when there were other means of protests and other ways to advocate for change without committing a crime and I found myself arguing this to effectively help him escape conviction in circumstances where he had community crime and he'd done so in public. I've also represented Jane mentioned that I've been in the crime commission. I was in the crime commission which is a very unique jurisdiction to be in. My client had been summoned to appear before the crime commission and was not permitted to disclose why he was going there to anyone including his wife, his employer and couldn't really explain his long absences for work because he would be committing a crime to do so and I'm happy to answer questions about that later on. Tonight, I'm going to cover four issues that I can in the time frame we've got. I'm going to talk about balancing religious freedom with LGBTIQ rights, I'm going to talk about Australia's history of LGBT hate crimes, I'm going to talk about Mark Latham's Education Legislation Amendment Parental Rights Bill and then finally I'm going to talk to you about how you can get involved and how you can be a change maker. When I talk about LGBT discrimination and religious freedom, I often make a point of saying that I personally and many of my friends in the LGBT community space, are not against people having the right to express their religion or practice their religion but the principle that we talk about at Australian laws for human rights and from an international law perspective, is that human rights are not in a hierarchy, religious freedom is not Superior to LGBT rights to be free from harassment, all human rights are equal and where they conflict  we need a mechanism and a structure for resolving those conflicts and that's why human rights act is so important and New South Wales doesn't have one. In New South Wales, because I am a graduate of the university and it's in New South Wales university, I'm going to talk about probably the worst anti-discrimination law that exists in Australia and that is the New South Wales Act. I might mention that it is before a parliamentary committee at the moment it's up for review and that review is desperately needed. I've got there an image of George Michael painted as a saint and some of you may know that mural existed in Newtown for quite some time and was defaced by people I referred to in a column I wrote for the Sydney Morning Herald a few years ago who were Christian Warriors, who were seeking to face that mural on the basis that it offended their religion. Section 56 of the Anti-Discrimination Act of NSW says that nothing in the Act affects any other practice when it comes to propagating religion, doctrines of that religion and any susceptibilities of the adherence of that religion it's effectively a carte blanche permission for people within or religious organisations to discriminate, to exclude people that they disagree with. For example the Wesley Mission under this provision is permitted to deny services to say gay men seeking to foster if they want to if that is offensive or offends adherence of that religion. Now what is what's probably most concerning in the Anti-Discrimination Act is that there is no protection for people in relation to religious discrimination. Someone who experiences religious discrimination does not have any rights under the NSW Anti-Discrimination Act and so I'm a proponent for legislative change for drafting within the Act to facilitate a mechanism for someone who is discriminated against on religious grounds to be able to take in action. I object to this kind of carte blanche exemption of religious organisations from their own enacting their own discrimination against say LGBT people in circumstances where there is no hierarchy of rights and religious freedom is not a superior right. I do want the NSW Anti-Discrimination Act to have a provision for release protection and I might just give you an example of how that plays out. My firm is currently acting for a Saudi gay man who is suing an educational provider in circumstances where in a class, I won't try not to identify him, in a class the teacher of his class made comments which were offensive to his religion and he made a complaint to the anti-discrimination board without us, without legal representation, and the complaint was declined by the president because in the president's words 'the respondent organisation had taken steps, made efforts to remedy the issue'. He then came to my firm and wanted to prosecute a discrimination claim. Now he can't. He can't. In New South Wales he can't prosecute a religious discrimination complaint. It has to be race or it has to be homosexual or transgendered. It can't be religious and that's an example and we the matter is about to settle and  quite favourably to him because we ran a quasi-race religion ethno, a religious argument and I think the respondent probably saw that we were going after them but in what I want to say there is it's peculiar because we never you know he was a gay man and that wasn't the issue he was Saudi, but that wasn't the issue, he was Muslim he's Muslim and that is the issue and yet he has no protection under NSW's law. So that's just an example of how that plays out. Now this mural here was defaced and it was a very sad day for the LGBT community because that mural represented freedom and liberation and all the good things about being a member of our community and the people who defaced it, were charged with property offences and tried to run religious freedom arguments in the court where they failed and then anyway I won't comment more but if you want to read my article you can Google it and see what I had to say about it. When it comes to homosexual vilification, that is inciting hatred towards homosexuals, the NSW Act contains this provision which says it's effectively unlawful to by a public act inside hatred but there are exemptions and they are many, nothing in this section renders unlawful a fair report of a public act, so the news can report on a on a vilifying act and not be than the subject of the claim. There's also the issue of absolute privilege which defamation students would know all about and there's also this issue of an act done reasonably and in good faith for academic, artistic, religious instruction or research purposes or for other purposes in the public interest whatever that means including discussion and expositions of any act or matter. Now all of the constitutional students would know, that Australia doesn't have free speech we have an implied right to freedom of political communication and yet people who want to vilify the community that the homosexual or LGBT community say that they have the right to say whatever they want, but I would argue that words can be extremely hurtful and damaging and there have been many cases in the public arena where the LGBT community has been vilified during the postal survey episode that we went through with gay marriage. You would have seen a lot of statements in some areas of the press which I would argue are vilifying, but which would probably have one of these exceptions including public interest or discussion or exposition of an actual matter. So vilification laws are just not up to where we are up to in society at the moment. This Act was drafted a time when Twitter and Facebook and social media as of holding exist and it really gives rise to all kinds of issues. I would argue that the law in New South Wales has to balance religious freedoms with LGBT rights. That LGBT people need more protection. That people with religious convictions also need protection. We need a human rights Act and we need probably a jurisdiction to hear disputes about conflicting rights. In Canada, there are examples of judicial commissions or courts that can hear argents between plaintiffs and respondents in respect of conflicting rights. I would argue that if you've got practitioners in that space who are familiar with human rights and how they're applied, you can resolve conflicts but at the moment I don't think our legal system in New South Wales anyway can deal with them sufficiently. I'm happy to ask to any further questions about that at the end I might just say that my firm acted for Garry Burns who's a prominent LGBT activist and he had made a vilification complaint against a person who had run for political office down in Victoria and that person had said in her campaigning as a member of the Christian Democratic party, that all gay men are pedophiles always to that effect. Garry took her on and brought proceedings in the New South Wales Civil and Administrative Tribunal for vilification and the matter where all the way to NSW Court of Appeal after various appeals. The question ultimately for the Court of Appeal was whether the tribunal the Civil Administrative Tribunal had jurisdiction to hear a dispute between residents of different states. In a world where communications such as vilification happens online, as if it is happening next door you know, what that political candidate said down in Victoria, she may as well have said it on the front steps of parliament in New South Wales and it's an example of a tribunal that was set up to deal with discrimination disputes, being incapable of dealing with a dispute like that because it infringed the Constitution for it to do so, it's not a chapter three court. We acted in the High Court for Garry, we knew I think we knew what the answer was but it had to go to the High Court as a public interest case for the High Court to determine that in that case you can see that online. My firm worked with Alan's Linklaters and Landon Rodgers in that case for Garry and obviously we lost it we were trying to argue that for the intensive purposes of the Discrimination Act that was a jurisdiction for that dispute. Now Garry has effectively had to run all these procedures again in New South Wales you know chapter three court to bring that prosecution. The next thing I want to talk about is LGBT hate crimes and this is quite a passionate issue for me and it probably is some of you may have clicked on that link when I was on the drama a few years ago talking about this inquiry but my passion for this issue comes from me working as a teenager at KFC in our time. One Saturday night when a relief manager was appointed from the king's cross store and anyone who knows tennis class in the 90s knew it as colourful place where gay men and lesbians and transgender people and drag queens went out at night. When this manager came into my store he was wearing the pink shirt which is she ordinarily worn by female managers, you know the male managers wore blue and the female managers wore pink and he wore pink. I remember him being quite a nice guy, he was really kind, he was supportive, he wanted to get the shift done and then all of a sudden one of my colleagues in the store came up to me and whispered to me and said that 'he and his friends would go out looking for people like that manager on the northern beaches with a view to robbing them, bashing them and chucking them off cliffs'. As a 14 year old, I wasn't even out, I hadn't even worked out my own sexuality, I knew I think I knew that I was gay but I hadn't said it to myself and yet I had this person telling me that he was effectively brutalising my community, he was hunting people down  because of their sexuality and I didn't have the confidence to stand up to him then but I tell you what, I'm going after everyone  like him and I'm gonna hold them to account because there is an awful history of gay murders and bashings in this state. South Australia has it too, Victoria has it as well. As a society we cannot move on until the people who committed these awful crimes they held to account. So I've pasted some images of some of the deceased here and I realise that might be triggering for a lot of you, but I want to really raise this issue because it's undetermined and you know it needs to be in the mainstream. Our society can't move on until we've dealt with this issue. You'll see the top left hand corner is Ross Warren. Ross was a news reader from Wollongong. He parked his car just near Marks Park in Bondi and he was never seen again. No one knows what happened to him although there was a coronial inquest and that inquest only came because Ross's mother was writing to the New South Wales Commissioner of Police saying 'my son is missing, can you please help me find my son, I think something's gone wrong he's if this isn't like him I need your help'. Her first letter was ignored and then you know a few weeks later she wrote it again she said 'commissioner please I really need some help I think something's gone astray here'. She was ignored and then she wrote the third time and she said you know 'it's been a year my son's missing, there's been no investigation I want an inquest'. She was ignored and it was only because of a beautiful police officer working in the eastern suburbs who came across Ross's file and found all of his mother's letters and thought something is going on here and this is not a gay cop, this is a straight cop. Beautiful beautiful man and he looked into the into the matter and he organised surveillance and you name it. He thought he'd identified some games of views that were a hunting gay man. Anyway, he referred the matter to the New South Wales Coroner's court and Jacqueline Mirage, he was a coroner at the time, conducted an inquiry and she determined that Ross Warren was murdered and his body's never been found. Gilles Mattaini the guy in the black and white next to Ross. He's you know no one's been found is caring either and he also disappeared in Bondi. John Russell below, John was found at the bottom of a cliff, deceased and he had in his hands hair, are presumably the hair of his attackers and that exhibit went missing. You know a critical evidence that may have led to the prosecution of the person that killed him is missing so that's why I'm campaigning for this, campaigning for a judicial commission of inquiry. We've got a parliamentary inquiry going right now it's been fantastic to put on the record this awful history and allow victims because there are survivors and you'll see in the bottom right hand corner my client Alan Rosendale with Paul Simes, the redhead on the left. There are survivors who want to tell their stories and a parliamentary inquiry has been a great vehicle for that because it's put onto Hansard on the parliamentary record, the stories of victims of hate crimes. Alan who you see there in the right hand corner, was bashed in 1989 on South Dowling Street. He was at a gay beach. He admits that he was there for sex but that doesn't give the right to anyone to abuse him or assault him. Anyway, a car pulled up and out of that car jumped four or five men who then popped the boot and grabbed what Alan originally thought were plaints of wood but well we're not sure what they were. They chased all of the gay men out of that beach and Alan tripped him fell and then he was bashed in the gutter and bashed unconscious. The guy on the left in the red hair is Paul Simes and he didn't know Alan at the time but he was walking across the street he'd gone to get some milk and he saw Alan being bashed and he reported it to NSW Police Force. He confirmed that the vehicle registration that he saw was a New South Wales police vehicle. Alan put that matter to the back of his head. He was taken to hospital, the hospital notes that we've obtained said that he was bashed by skinheads but he never he never said to use batch by skinhead. So the person investigating Alan's death had kind of created a bit of a narrative.  Rick Feneley who's a beautiful journalist at Sydney Morning Herald, wrote about Alan's bashing but at that time, didn't know that it was Alan who was bashed. He was only relying on Paul Sime's account and Alan read about Paul Sime's account of his bashing and thought hang on that's me and then contacted Rick Feneley and they retraced their steps. Paul Sime says that he went to a meeting of the top brass of the NSW police force who accepted that there was a police vehicle involved in the bashing but the New South Wales police force says that that was another bashing, that that wasn't Alan's bashing and we don't have anything. So that's still going and I look forward to finding out what happened to Alan all that time ago but it's people like Alan that we need to come forward to talk about that. The purpose of the Parliamentary inquiry was to raise awareness of Sydney's dark history, put evidence of hate crimes on Hansard and the parliamentary record but also to allow victims to be heard. We also wanted to develop government policy about LGBT safety and justice, we wanted the government to really take these honours an issue because LGBT people still aren't safe. We want to identify issues of further investigation and we want to build a pathway to a judicial commission. A lot of people say to me oh why didn't you go for a royal commission? Why weren't you campaigning for a judicial commission of inquiry? Quite frankly, I just didn't think it would get up. I thought that a parliamentary inquiry was probably the first soft step to put these matters on the record with my end game knowing, you know I would eventually go for this judicial commission of inquiry and that's what I'm going for now and my friends working with ACON NSW to get that on board and I think it'll eventually happen. The parliamentary inquiry was a really important first step and those of you who don't know, there is a big difference between a parliamentary inquiry and a judicial commissioner set out those differences here. Judicial commissions really have investigative powers. They can summons witnesses and interrogate evidence. They can compel production of documents from private citizens and government departments and corporations and they can question the investigative methods and strategies and they can then provide a report you know. I would like the officers who originally were contacted about Ross Warren's disappearance, to explain why his mother's letters were ignored. I want John Russell's investigators to explain how the only exhibit that would probably lead us to his murderer went missing. I want people who write off gay deaths as suicides to explain why they held the prejudices they did and why leads weren't followed, why weren't witnesses spoken to, you know why was evidence lost. I think we need to get to the bottom of that and for those people I don't want them to be disciplined, I don't want them to be punished, but I think we need to we need answers we need to identify call it out that there are there were at the time parts of government that were not responsive to our community and we were ignored. In that respect, I think you know the AIDS crisis some of you won't know, but in the 80s there was a campaign a health campaign to slow down the AIDS virus which was killing gay men. HIV was a massive thing and there are some parallels with the COVID pandemic believe it or not, but the health campaign depicted the Grim Reaper throwing bowling balls down a bowling ball alley, wiping out children and families. It was a very effective campaign, it helped slow the AIDS crisis, it helped bring awareness to gay men about the dangers of unprotected sex, it was a very effective health campaign but the other collateral consequence was that gay men were alienated, we were put into onto the fringe we were pitched as perverts, as a sexual minority unworthy of equal rights and I put this you know this gay bashing issue down to a lot of that and a lot of the prejudice that flowed from that. Jane how are we going for timing.

>> Jane: It's 37 past six so if we want to try and leave enough time for questions maybe to 45 and then have 15 minutes of questions if that's possible.

>> Nicholas: Sure okay. So with that in mind, I'm going to skip my Mark Latham's Education Bill other than to tell you that at the moment, Mark Latham is a NSW member of parliament, he's the former federal opposition leader Labour party, he's now a member of One Nation and he has put forward an amendment Bill to the Education Act of New South Wales to amend that act and effectively remove any kind of education that might help gay and trans kids understand who they are. So for example he wants to prohibit schools from teaching that trans and gender people exist and should be treated with respect. This is a law that is before the New South Wales Parliament right now and it attempts to do this. He wants to prohibit school counsellors from affirming a trans or gender diverse student or providing them with any support. He wants to put teachers at risk of losing a job when they support trans or gender diverse students. He wants to enshrine biological fallacies and describe intersex people as disordered. He wants to allow parents to deny their children access to lessons, he wants to require schools to present discredited counter narratives, for example when discussing evolution he says that his teachers should be able to talk about creationism and he says when talking about science and biology, that teachers should be able to talk about anti-vaccination theories and he says that when talking about Indigenous incarceration, teachers should be able to talk about their own ideologies about over-representation. I just want to put that out there because that's a really concerning piece of legislation and when you're in law school, you just you're you think that the law is law and it's there to regulate society and as lawyers we are there to navigate the law and advise clients about the law. Well let me tell you something, the law doesn't have to always be the law and you are all in a position to change the law and when pieces of legislation like this come out, I would say that it's every lawyer's obligation to write to their local member, write to the premier and express dissatisfaction with any government support. I'm not saying the government supports this bill but it is the subject of a committee and an inquiry and it has gotten the attention of various MPs and I would I would say it's an attack, it's an attack on the LGBT community and it's pretty disgusting. Anyway, the final thing I want to say before we go into questions, is that you can all effect change and you can all get involved and I want to show you how. As Jane mentioned, I sit on the executive of Australian Lawyers for Human Rights and the public interest litigation chair and I'm also the LGBT subcommittee chair at AOHL we have some other committees and I'm not saying you all have to come and join the LGBT community but you're welcome. We have a women and girls committee, we have a children's rights committee, we have a First Nations committee, refugee rights committee, a freedoms committee and a human rights actor committee and all of those committees are very busy. They are all writing submissions on draft bills in federal parliament, appearing at inquiries and giving evidence, engaging in advocacy meeting with members of parliament. They're all doing good things and we rely so much on very keen law students. So think about joining Australian Lawyers for Human Rights because you can effect change. That's my presentation and I'm keen to answer your questions.

>> Mark: Well thank you Nick for a really insightful, informative and invaluable presentation I think I can definitely say that I learned a lot and got out a lot from it. Just as we go into questioning, please feel free to put your questions in the chat box or take yourself off on mute and or go on video. I'm sure we'll appreciate that and I guess I'll kick off questions. So I was looking into the Education Legislation Amendment Bill and they brought into the discussion, a legal definition of gender fluidity so I guess I wanted to get your thoughts on a legal definition of that.

>> Nicholas: I think that's a question for a doctor rather than a lawyer to be honest. The issue for gender fluidity is really up to the individual and how they feel and how they identify. There are various States and territories that have dealt with this issue Tasmania is probably the best in terms of who can change their birth certificate and in what circumstances, without the compulsory surgery that some states mandate. So yeah I probably won't get into what gender fluidity means other than to say it's really up for the individual. 

>> Mark: Thanks Nick. Does anyone else have questions? Maximillian I think. 

>> Maximilian: Thank you for that presentation. just in terms of the section you went over in terms of homosexual vilification and transgender vilification, was there any particular state you saw good laws from that we could potentially adapt or borrow to New South Wales?

>> Nicholas: Thanks Max. Look I think Tasmania again surprisingly because it was the last step to decriminalise homosexuality but it seems to be the first thing to do anything to protect us. I think has a really good Anti-Discrimination Act. But you know what? What I think what we really need is a human rights act. Every state and territory at a commonwealth level, we need a human rights act because the issues of rights and discrimination and the right to be freed from discrimination as a human right, generally I find that they're always conflicting and we need a regime to deal with those and a forum for them to be prosecuted that is looks at matters as if they are rights.

>> Maximilian: Thank you.

>> Mark: Awesome thank you. I think Lucia had a question. 

>> Lucia: Yeah hi sorry if this question isn't super clear or articulate I'm very tired. So like obviously you spoke about gay bashing and violence against queer people but I've been reading a lot about how prison and police abolition are like quite intrinsically linked because of how they it's about thinking outside like what we find to be normal and I know there's a lot of like Grassroots movements in terms of like queer liberation and police and prison abolition, but is there any like movement or kind of work towards that in I guess like in a traditional legal capacity?

>> Nicholas: Thanks Lucia. I'm not sure I don't think so and I'm not sure I subscribe either. It's complex but yeah I'm not sure in a formal legal space I just don't know.

>> Mark: Thanks Nick and we might go to sorry if I pronounce this around Ymania.

>> Ymania: Oh it's Ymania Brown. Thanks Mark and Nicholas thanks so much. My name is Ymania Brown and I did a Masters Intellectual Property Law at UTS. We have very similar roads. I went through corporate and now I'm a full-time human rights activist. I'm the co-Secretary General of ILGA World which is based in Geneva the largest organisation representative members from around the world. What you are describing in your presentation is the reality on the ground for many human rights activists but I'm wondering if you have given some thought as part of your collective group, to Australia's UPR processes or the universal periodical review processes as an added avenue to bring these issues up for discussion. The lofty ideals of the United Nations and the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights are very aspirational but the reality as you know as we've just heard from your presentation on the ground, is completely different and that these laws, like Mark Latham's proposed bill, they are nothing more than state-sponsored homophobia, lysstophobia and transphobia and we need to do everything we can to combat that. So that was just a you know a thing about the UPR process because that's when Australia will turn up to the United Nations and the world will then question them on their record on human rights.

>> Nicholas: Yeah thanks Ymania. You raise a really good point and as you were talking, the first thing I want to say is I've talked about LGBT rights and that's not let's not forget that First Nations people are the original victims of discrimination, alienation, harassment, violence, murder in this country. I speak as a white gay man who's probably in a quite a privileged position and I can effect change. I talk about LGBT hate crimes and murders but I tell you what we all know the First Nations people of this country have suffered enduring centuries of violence and murder and many of the perpetrators have not have never been in order to account. So I just want to say that. The second thing I want to say is I completely agree with you that Australia is a signatory to many international treaties. Our governments have an obligation to make laws that are consistent with their international obligations and we also have an obligation to ensure that citizens can raise complaints and have their complaints dealt with by in a forum, with a mechanism that is designed with international human rights laws and treaties at play and we just don't have that right now. There are points of call, you can raise a human rights breach. The Human Rights Law Centre for example has recently raised a complaint about in relation to people from Papua New Guinea and what they've suffered as a result of mining practices. You can raise human rights complaints but what I'm saying is that we need something bigger resourced that is set up to deal with what is an international framework of human rights which seems to be conveniently lost when particular parties get into power.

>> Mark: Awesome thanks Ymania and thanks Nick for answering that. I think we had Natasha had her hand up. We might go to Lachlan or Natasha.

>> Natasha: Hey Nick thank you so much for your presentation. I had a question just I guess in a bit more of a personal note. I know a lot of people including myself are very passionate about issues that are often like because they're closely linked to the community. For example as a woman of colour, I'm very interested in intersectional approaches to feminism and advocacy for women of colour and I was just wondering how I guess you managed to advocate whilst also maintaining an underlying strength because I noticed you said that potentially you wouldn't do another case like you did at the beginning of your presentation.

>> Nicholas: Yeah thanks Natasha. Yeah really good question. You know I've talked about that the hate crimes my campaign for justice and justice is a loose word but we'll use it now, for victims of hate crimes and I talk about that message over and over and I talk about those deaths over and over and it never gets easier. Like for example there was a moment 20 minutes ago where I thought I was going to cry as I was talking to you was just you know I felt myself getting sad and I was on ABC radio just after the New South Wales government had commissioned the inquiry, and I was with Rick Finely he's that amazing journalist who's raised the profile and Alan Rosendale and we were in the studio talking about hate crimes. Cassie McCullagh who was the ABC journalist, was talking about her time and working as a young teenager at a hairdressing salon in Oxford Street and how it was like for some people was an amazing time, the 80s and the 90s, I wish I could have been a gay man in the 80s and 90s, but for all this violence it was actually quite a cool time. There were clubs pumping you know it was a moment of liberation and freedom but it also had this very dark side. Anyway, I got out of talking about that and Cassie put on her favourite track she said 'this song reminds me of that time' and she played it and the music was so evocative it really it struck something in me and I got into the taxi and I just burst into tears like I was so zonked like it's just years and years and years of campaigning we're all catching up with me and I was a bloody mess like absolute mess. You keep strong because I think if you have a conscience and you identify what's fair, then that is the core of humanity. You're appealing to the common good and just remember that you're on the good side of history. That if you push on, in years to come, you know you will have effected change and that's what that's how I keep strong you know. I mean that police case, it really did destroy me but you know what I mean it's brought people into my office. People coming to me and say 'I want you to fight for me' and I say 'are you sure?'. You know you sure you want to do that because I saw what it did to those clients and I know it would happen again but it's look I just think it's really important to keep a balance make sure you're doing other things exercise, you know have a project, read take holidays, that kind of stuff.

>> Natasha: Thank you so much. 

>> Mark: Awesome thanks Natasha and thanks Nick. That was some important takeaways from that question. Before we go on to Lachlan's question, I might just remind everyone to if you have a question, please feel free to put in the chat or raise your hand or just ask it  but yes Lachlan take it away with your question.

>> Lachlan: Thank you. Hi Nick again. Great to see you again. My question is probably a little bit more of like a theoretical sort of question based on your discussion of the Anti-Discrimination Act and your idea about introducing a provision of the Act to incorporate religious discrimination. For students who have undertaken Australian civil liberties law as an elective at UTS, we sort of learn about how the current discrimination framework focuses people mostly upon inherent or immutable characteristics of people and there's sort of a line of argument within the development of discrimination law or not in Australia and around the world particularly in the US that focuses on the idea that discrimination law is there to protect people on the basis of something that they cannot change about themselves. So for example, race discrimination is there because of the fact that you can't change your race you know you can't change your ethnic identity. In the same way that on the basis of sexuality, it's not realistically possible to change your sexuality from gay to straight etc. So how do you sort of explain that the idea of introducing religious discrimination and how that potentially conflicts with the existing idea that it focuses on protecting immutable and inherent characteristics of people?

>> Nicholas: Yeah well I would go back to international human rights law which is really grounded in the freedom of the individual. You know the freedom to express oneself in the way that they want to and I wouldn't necessarily agree that religion is changeable. I mean I agree that people change religions all the time. If a person has found a belief and within a religion that they have been brought up in I'm just not sure that they should somehow be exempt from protection because some might argue that they could change their religion or become not religious. I think also science has proved a few things. Science has proved that race doesn't exist and science has also proved that there's probably a religious gene in people. So query whether you can change that.

>> Lachlan: Thank you.

>> Jane: Sorry to interrupt at the end. I'm very conscious of the time I know Rick's got his hand up. We might have space for one short question after Rick but it would just I guess it would depend on how lengthy it is. Rick?

>> Rick: Thanks. I'll try to get it brief. Thanks for putting a name and a face to those victims of the gay bashings and the crimes in the 1980s, I think it's really important to do that. My question is essentially what has changed in relation to that? So back when I was an angry young activist, we sort of worked on a lot of these issues but since then and you know at the time there's a lot of police harassing and continued violence and beats in particular, but since then we've had grinder we've had high profile High Court judge, politicians from the LGBTI community, a lot more visibility issues. Are you in your practice still seeing those issues of violence in beats, violence amongst gay men in those sort of situations and also about police or police still harassing gay men who are meeting each other in public places?

>> Nicholas: Thanks Rick. I don't think I can speak. I see a lot of violence against the LGBTI community in my practice but I wouldn't put it as systemic or state-based. I think grinder apps, dating apps have raised vulnerabilities for everyone in relation to how they date, who they meet online and the misrepresentations that can occur in dating apps as to who someone might be. I have had clients who have well I mean I've been acting for them in a criminal capacity. I should have said also that my main gig is criminal law in case you missed that. I've had clients come to me who have effectively been in a hotel room met someone on Grinder, that person has come in and given one of my clients drugs, they'd then become inebriated and have discovered a video of them online of them being effectively violently bashed in a bathroom while intoxicated. I've seen that quite a bit but I won't put that down to straight on gay, I won't put that on police. I just think that it's a vulnerable situation. You mix online dating and sex with drugs and you've got problems.

>> Rick: Thanks for that.

>> Jane: All right. I'm sorry to put the damp on all the very interesting questions, but unfortunately we've come up to seven o'clock. I wanted to thank Nicholas so much for such insightful commentary and so much for us to think about and issues to continue to explore and hopefully, people will watch the legislative Council inquiry in great detail. So thank you Nicholas for your time and thank you everyone else for your questions and your participation this evening. 

>> Nicholas: Thanks a lot Jane. Thanks everyone.

>> Crystal: Goodnight everyone. Thanks again Nick. Wow so many thank yous. See the thank yous in the chat box Nick.