ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Awards

Project Title

Ending Aqua Nullius: Sustainable and Legitimate Water Law in settler States

Project Summary

This project aims to investigate how treaty and agreement making can lead to water law reform in settler colonial states. This project will use interdisciplinary approaches in Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, Canada and the US to develop new knowledge of how Indigenous sovereignty shapes water law. Expected outcomes of this project include enhanced collaborations between researchers and Indigenous Peoples, evidence-based law and policy guidelines for ethical, pluralist water laws, and context-specific pathways for water law reform developed in partnership with Indigenous Peoples as part of Treaty-making. This should provide significant benefits, such as improving both the legitimacy and ecological sustainability of water law in Australia.

Duration

2023-2025

Project Title

Digital Mental Health Care and the Law

Project Summary

‘Digital mental health care’ is advancing rapidly in Australia, outpacing legal regulation. This project aims to provide new understanding of the medico-legal issues and develop a nuanced set of principles to guide legal frameworks for digital mental health technologies. The project will expand Australia’s knowledge of digital modalities in mental health care to optimise support services, protect patient privacy, uphold user safety and minimise risk to individuals and communities. The research is expected to improve mental health care by assisting people with mental health conditions, health practitioners, government agencies, courts and the broader public to use digital mental health technologies safely and effectively.

Duration

2020-2022

Project Title

The Law and Politics of Machine Listening

Project Summary

Machine listening refers to the branch of AI driving the rapid growth of smart speakers, voice assistants and other always-on listening devices. Many of its applications offer real benefits, but machine listening also poses urgent challenges across privacy, security, surveillance, human rights and other areas of law and politics. These challenges are yet to receive a systematic response. This project aims to examine the effects of machine listening’s emergence in order to develop a conceptual framework for regulation and greater public scrutiny of this growing field of power. These outcomes are intended to impact public policy and enhance the social benefits of future technologies, devices and services that use machine listening techniques.

Duration

2020-2022

Project Title

Can and should we reform the Goods and Services Tax?

Project Summary

This project aims to respond to the rapid erosion of Australia’s revenue sources by addressing the future of the Goods and Services Tax (GST). The GST taxes less than half of consumer spending and up to $4.5 billion is lost to avoidance and evasion each year. This project expects to generate new knowledge in tax law and policy by using an innovative approach to assess whether possible reform options are viable, sustainable and equitable.

Expected outcomes of this project include the formulation of achievable and defensible options that offer a clear path forward on GST reform. This should provide significant benefits to the community by contributing to a fairer and more sustainable tax system capable of meeting the needs of all Australians.

Duration

2019-2021

Project Title

Restoring public trust in charities – reforming governance and enforcement

Project Summary

The charitable sector is an essential part of the social fabric and economy in Australia. Public trust in the sector has been damaged by governance failures (particularly in religious contexts), exacerbated by the sector’s complex and incoherent governance system. As yet, there has been limited academic consideration or empirical analysis of the effectiveness of the governance and regulatory framework of the sector or concrete reform proposals. The aim of this project is to undertake crucial comparative analysis and empirical research of these aspects, and to develop proposals for effective law and policy reform in order to strengthen and maximize the sector’s capacity to contribute to the social and economic life in Australia.

Duration

2019-2021

Project Title

Work in franchises: searching for solutions at the regulatory frontier

Project Summary

The recent underpayment scandals that have plagued 7-Eleven, Domino’s Pizza and other franchises have generated immense public debate and prompted significant law reform in Australia. As yet, there has been limited academic consideration of the effectiveness of regulatory frameworks and initiatives designed to enhance and ensure work-related rights and responsibilities of franchise workers, franchisees and franchisors. By combining comparative doctrinal analysis of labour and competition and consumer laws, with mixed methods research, this project aims to address a critical gap in regulatory scholarship and provide fresh empirical and theoretical insights into the effective regulation of work in franchises in Australia and beyond.

Duration

2018-2020

Project Title

Regulating cumulative environmental effects: designing global best practice

Project Summary

Scientists know that the environmental effects of separate projects can accumulate to pose significant risks. Yet law often allows unintended environmental harms by ignoring cumulative effects, or using weak controls that fail to prevent harm in practice. This innovative research aims to analyse and evaluate the theoretical bases, adoption and use of laws regulating cumulative environmental effects in the US, EU, Canada and Australia. Using novel methods combining law, ethics, and natural and spatial science, this project seeks to build an framework of globally relevant best practice tools for regulating cumulative effects. This promises to increase the capacity of regulators, industry, and the community to better manage environmental harms.

Duration

2018-2020

Project Title

Addressing age discrimination in employment

Project Summary

This project aims to research the effectiveness of Australian age discrimination laws. While demographic ageing necessitates extending working lives, few question the effectiveness of Australian age discrimination laws in supporting this ambition. This project draws on mixed methods and comparative UK experiences to offer empirical and theoretical insights into Australian age discrimination law. Intended outcomes include a comprehensive empirical dataset and a normative model for legal reform in Australia, to inform public policy and debate and improve responses to demographic ageing, providing economic, health and social benefits.

Duration

2017-2019

Project Title

International Law and the Legacies of Fascist Internationalism

Project Summary

The project has three aims: to uncover and elaborate the fascist approach to international law that developed in inter-war Italy; to generate new comparative and interdisciplinary analyses of fascist internationalism; and to use this archival and comparative research to shed light on the contemporary
global order and in particular its logic of violence, hierarchy and expansion.  The project aims to improve our understanding of three interrelated phenomena of concern to Australia and globally: intensifying migration flows, increasing economic uncertainty, and the resurgent far right.  It
may provide a historical and legal framework for national and international responses to these phenomena and clarify the long-term structural consequences of military and financial interventions in the developing world.

Duration

2016-2018