UNSW Law Alumni News 2015 No.1 by Designbug

UNSW Law Alumni News Magazine Published by: UNSW Law, UNSW Australia UNSW Sydney NSW 2052 Australia Editors: Jordana Wong, Lindsay Owens Contributors: Lindsay Owens, Jordana Wong, Eric White, David Dixon, Ian McGill, Keiran Hardy, Michael Kaine CRICOS Provider No. 00098G

UNSW Law Alumni News

MESSAGE FROM THE ALUMNI NETWORK PRESIDENT At the 2015 AGM, Eric White and Shikha Sethi were elected to the roles of President and Vice-President. UNSW Law congratulates Eric and Shikha and looks forward to working with them in continuing to engage and grow our Alumni Network.

hikha and I are honoured to lead the Alumni Network. We look forward to working with the Law School to build on the Network’s strong foundations and further engage with our alumni in Sydney and beyond, as well as with current students. We thank Tim Gordon and James Nguyen for their excellent leadership over the last three years. They have led the Network in a positive direction and we are glad they will remain involved. We also congratulate James on winning the UNSW Young Alumni Award. In the first half of 2015, the Alumni Network has been as active as always. We have celebrated 30 and 29 Year Reunions and a successful Winter Drinks event in June. The Network has hosted a number of alumni gatherings in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Zurich: a true testament to our vast alumni network. If you are living overseas and would like to get involved, we encourage you to get in touch with the alumni office. A number of events are lined up for the remainder of the year including the Ngoc Tram Nguyen Scholarship Dinner, a second Look Who’s Talking lecture, and the annual Spring Drinks. We encourage everyone to get involved! Eric White (BCom/LLB ’11) UNSW Law Alumni Network President

A focus on academic excellence, social engagement and global impact resonate strongly with UNSW Law’s priorities. FROM THE DEAN

NSW’s new Vice Chancellor, Professor Ian Jacobs, has launched a strategic review, focusing on academic excellence, social engagement and global impact. These themes resonate strongly with UNSW Law’s priorities. Professor Jacobs will be the guest speaker at this year’s Ngoc Tram Nguyen Scholarship Dinner on Friday, 4 September in Canley Vale, which we hope will fund the fourth NTN Scholarship. This is always an inspiring event and I hope many of you will come. It was great to see James Nguyen, the NTN Dinner team’s dynamic leader, recognised with the UNSW Young Alumni Award recently. Meanwhile, the Law School continues to introduce new learning opportunities for our students. Earlier this year, we held a new Summer School at UC Berkeley. In Sydney, we strengthened our long relationship with Redfern Legal Centre by sponsoring their Policing Practice, which offers our students excellent

opportunities in a Police Powers Clinic. Finally, the Refugee Advice and Casework Service (RACS) is relocating to premises provided by UNSW; again, this opens extensive experiential learning opportunities for our students. This issue of Alumni News highlights more exceptionally talented new colleagues. It also focuses on the outstanding work of a group of alumni, led by Rebecca Gilsenan and Nina Walton, in funding a new scholarship for Indigenous students, named in honour of Judge Bob Bellear, UNSW alumnus and Australia’s first Aboriginal judge. I hope you enjoy reading news from UNSW Law.

Professor David Dixon Dean, UNSW Law

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Leverage our pro bono commitment: we set a target to have a minimum of 10% of our pro bono hours as work for ATSI organisations or causes. Our focus is on complex work and advocacy. An example includes our work for the Public Interest Law Clearing House in relation to the Bowraville murders. We helped to prepare an application to John Hatzistergos, the Attorney General at the time. The application requested that the Attorney exercise his powers under s115 of the Crimes (Appeal and Review) Act to apply to the Court of Criminal Appeal for an order that the main suspect be re-tried. Creating employment opportunities in our firm and in the community: we have grown our own Indigenous internship program, and have, to date, employed 84 interns for a two week winter internship around our offices in Australia. We also introduced a cadetship program in our corporate services team. Allens has developed partnerships with organisations such as Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience and the Australian Indigenous Education Foundation to build our own capacity and to provide meaningful assistance to those organisations. Investing in Indigenous commercial relationships: we seek and track our spend with Supplier Nation certified organisations. We recognise that we need to do better at this and we are actively seeking some supplier diversity wins, and developing an understanding amongst our procurement decision makers around Indigenous supplier opportunities. Advocating and leading in the profession on reconciliation: we are active in the Business Council of Australia Indigenous Network and our Chief Executive Partner,

Michael Rose, also a UNSW Law alumnus, is the Co-Chair of the Legal Profession Reconciliation Network. We have organised workshops and have written extensively on constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Building cultural capacity in our firm and in the community: members of our RAP committee undertake cultural capacity training, and we've embedded this into our graduate induction training program. We have built a relationship with Jawun that includes magnificent opportunities for our staff to go on secondment for significant periods of time.

We began the journey because it was – self-evidently – the right thing to do. These pillars are only conceptual, to enable us to focus our efforts and to enable us – in an objective way – to report on our progress. In terms of work to do, we've found that building a talent pipeline does not happen overnight. It is a commitment that may take up to ten years. Keeping track of our interns and their careers is a challenge, and we know that other law firms do great work with firms such as Career Trackers, an Indigenous internship program. Recently, we've been doing work on our Constitution, our nation's founding document, which was drafted without any reference to the place of ATSI people in Australia. Adam Goodes, 2014 Australian of the Year, recently said of this failure, “(O)ur country’s Constitution still closes its eyes to the long part of the Australian story that predates British arrival… To me, the heartbreak of this Constitution exclusion is that it denies the true span of our country’s history to every Australian today, and to all those into the future, and will do so until we fix it.” 2015 No. 1

COUNTER-TERRORISM

The threat of foreign fighters returning from Iraq and Syria caused a flurry of counter-terrorism lawmaking in late 2014 and early 2015. Despite the fact that the Australian Parliament had enacted more than 50 pieces of counter-terrorism legislation since the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, new criminal offences and expanded surveillance powers were seen as necessary to respond to this threat.

hese new counter-terrorism laws were passed in three sections. The first section granted the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) the power to access data held on computer networks; it introduced a controversial ‘special intelligence operations’ regime in which ASIO officers are granted immunity for committing unlawful acts during undercover operations; and it introduced new, and strengthened existing, criminal offences for intelligence whistleblowing. The second segment responded directly to the threat of foreign fighters. It raised the penalties for existing foreign incursion offences, it introduced the new offence of ‘advocating’ terrorism, and it introduced an offence of entering or remaining in a ‘declared area’. It also extended the operation of discredited counter-terrorism powers which were set to expire under sunset clauses in late 2015 and early 2016. The declared area offence was a remarkable innovation: it provides a maximum penalty of 10 years’ imprisonment where a person merely enters or remains in an area declared by the Foreign Minister as a ‘no-go zone’. It is a defence for a person to prove that they went to the area solely for a legitimate purpose, although this effectively puts the onus on the defendant to prove their innocence, and

UNSW Law Alumni News

the available defences are limited to a short list of specified reasons (such as conducting bona fide family visits or conducting official duties). The third section introduced a mandatory retention regime for ‘metadata’. This requires communication service providers to retain, for two years, a range of data including the time, date and location of all emails, SMS messages and phone calls. The Bill, as originally introduced into Parliament, left most of the details of this regime to be determined by the Attorney-General through regulation-making powers. This issue was remedied by the time the legislation was passed, although many other problems remain. Key among these is the fact that authorities which enforce fines or protect the public revenue may still have access to metadata. This could include local councils, private security firms, gambling authorities or universities. These three sections of national security legislation were introduced into Parliament shortly after I completed my PhD. I was lucky enough to undertake my doctorate as part of Professor George Williams’ Laureate Fellowship on Anti-Terror Laws: ‘Anti-Terror Laws and the Democratic Challenge’. A large group of researchers on this project looked at a variety of topics relating to counter-terrorism law in Australia and other countries – including how those laws impact on the separation of judicial power, rights to citizenship, and motive and intention in the criminal law. In my PhD, I considered how ‘hard power’ counter-terrorism laws (including criminal offences and police

powers) operate alongside ‘soft power’ responses to terrorism (including de-radicalisation programs and community projects for improving social cohesion). Soft power responses to terrorism were developed primarily in response to the London bombings of 2005, when Western governments began to focus on the threat of homegrown terrorism, and they have taken on increasing importance in relation to the threat of foreign fighters. How hard and soft strategies can best be combined remains a key question for governments aiming to prevent domestic terrorism.

How hard and soft strategies can best be combined remains a key question for governments aiming to prevent domestic terrorism. Most of the public debate and academic literature surrounding soft power responses to terrorism assume that soft power mitigates the negative effects of counter-terrorism laws. In my PhD, I demonstrated the problems with this assumption. For example, far from reducing the sense of alienation and discrimination caused by the disproportionate use of counterterrorism laws in Muslim communities, soft power responses to terrorism have frequently exacerbated those feelings. This is not to say that soft policy programs cannot play a beneficial role in counter-terrorism, but rather that those programs need to be designed carefully in order to have that beneficial effect – there is nothing inherent in the nature of those programs which makes them necessarily ‘better’ than hard power responses to terrorism. As a Research Fellow on Professor Williams’ Laureate Fellowship, I have co-authored submissions to parliamentary and independent inquiries on the new terrorism laws, including giving evidence to

parliamentary committees. I have also done a number of media interviews, on radio and live TV. Speaking with the media for the first time was a steep learning curve, and gave me valuable practice in how to explain complex legal issues to a wider audience. These experiences have confirmed to me the importance of conducting research which is relevant to current events and policy, and using that research to participate in public debate. From June to November 2015 I will be working with Alana Maurushat from the Law Faculty on a project in the Australian Cyber-Security Centre, which has recently been established within the Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA) at UNSW Canberra. We will be looking at data-sharing across government – which data sources are commonly used by government agencies, and which obligations and restrictions apply to the sharing of that data across government. This relates to my current research in that there are implications for law enforcement and security if government agencies cannot access relevant data in a timely fashion, but also implications for privacy if data about individuals is shared too easily across government. The project will require talking with government representatives and learning about new technologies. I see this area of research – relating to the collection and sharing of data about populations – as being key to the future of counter-terrorism and law enforcement.

I see this area of research – relating to the collection and sharing of data about populations – as being key to the future of counter-terrorism and law enforcement.

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UNSW YOUNG ALUMNI AWARD

UNSW Commerce/Law graduate James Nguyen has been awarded the 2014 UNSW Young Alumni Award for his significant contributions to both the University and the community. The Award recognises James’ tireless efforts to better the lives of those less fortunate – from disadvantaged high school students to terminally ill cancer patients – in an entirely selfless way.

ames graduated from UNSW Law in 2004. After graduation, James worked at a number of top tier law firms before transitioning to in-house roles, first at NAB and now at Rabobank, where he has been instrumental in establishing a legal team for one of the bank’s business divisions. Despite a demanding workload, James manages a second role as a creative, passionate and completely altruistic leader with a track record in giving back to his community. Over the past few years he has prioritised opportunities to instigate change and progress in matters close to his heart. James is passionate about social justice and, in particular, believes that economic disadvantage should not be a barrier to receiving a tertiary education. Having grown up in southwest Sydney, James is all too aware of the many children of refugee families who are suffering financially and therefore for whom university is nothing more than a dream.

Despite a demanding workload, James manages a second role as a creative, passionate and completely altruistic leader with a track record in giving back to his community. In 2012, in an effort to educate these students that higher education is in fact available to them, James spearheaded the first Ngoc Tram

UNSW Law Alumni News

Nguyen Scholarship Dinner. The packed out event not only raised muchneeded financial support for the scholarship, which gives socio-economically disadvantaged students from south-west Sydney the financial assistance needed to study at UNSW Law, but also served to raise awareness amongst the community about the scholarship and to raise the aspirations of local students to attend a top-tier law school. The dinner was considered to be so successful that it is now held every year, and has become the highlight of the Law School’s event calendar. More recently, James has found a way to make the harrowing experience of chemotherapy a little more pleasant for cancer patients and their families. In 2014, while his ailing father underwent treatment at the Liverpool Hospital Cancer Therapy Centre, James noticed the bareness of the walls in the hospital. Typical to his altruistic personality, James did not pause to feel sorry for himself but instead considered how miserable the drab surroundings were for the patients. James set forth to establish an exhibition of artwork at the Cancer Therapy Centre with the hope of brightening the journey for patients and their loved ones. “My inspiration for the art project came from the helplessness I felt whilst watching my father go through chemotherapy,” James says. “I took every second Wednesday off to sit with him for up to four hours at a time. He’d never let on about any pain he felt but when he fell asleep, I looked around

ALUMNI REUNIONS

UNSW Law Class of ’84 and ’85 Reunion

UNSW Law Alumni News

The UNSW Law Classes of 1984 and 1985 celebrated 30 years since graduation at the Museum of Contemporary Art this past March. Over 100 alumni got together for drinks, canapés and harbour views to reconnect and reminisce. Shemara Wikramanayake (BCom/LLB ’85), Nicola Wakefield Evans (BJuris/LLB ’84), Victoria Weekes (BCom/LLB ’85), Katrina Rathie (BCom/LLB ’85), Michael

Rose (BA/LLB ’85) and Elizabeth Broderick (BA/LLB ’84) were the instrumental organising committee behind the successful event. The reunion provided a chance for graduates to reflect on their time spent studying at UNSW Law, the relationships they formed during those coming-of-age years, and the time that has passed since entering the ‘real’ world. While some guests were caught up spotting familiar faces, others

UNSW Law Class of ’86 Reunion Also in March, UNSW Law alumnus Alastair Metcalf (BCom/LLB ’86), with help from Sally Larkings (BCom/LLB ’86), Mike Bowyer (BCom/LLB ’86) and Jenny Clarke (BCom ‘85/LLB ’86), brought classmates from the graduating year of 1986 together for a 29 year reunion at Barrack on Barracks. A large turnout and some big smiles filled the venue.

commented nostalgically on Law School as a very formative time in their lives. Photographs of years gone by, such as the 1984 Law Ball and 1980s law lectures, helped transport graduates back to their uni years, and were taken home as keepsakes by guests who found faces of old friends in the captured moments. Addressing her former

classmates, Shemara Wikramanayake, Head of Macquarie Funds, looked back on her time at UNSW, remarking on the diversity of the people at the University, and what she gained from that. “The uni years for me, without a doubt, were the happiest years of my life,” she said, a remark echoed by other guests throughout the reunion.

The UNSW Law Alumni Office is here to help you reach out to your cohort and facilitate reunions and other networking events! If you are looking to organise a reunion for your graduating class, please contact Lindsay Owens, Alumni Officer at UNSW Law, at lawalumni@unsw.edu.au.

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UNSW Law Alumni

NGO ILO NETWORK We will debate the big issues, defend those who cannot defend themselves, and relish the challenges along the way. We will make a difference in this world.

isplayed proudly across the front of the UNSW Law building, these words echo the essence of an outward-looking and forward thinking faculty. As a testament to the Law Schoolâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s encouragement of its students to be socially engaged, the number of UNSW Law alumni working in not-for-profit, nongovernment and international legal organisations is rapidly growing. Our graduates are looking at the world and not just asking how they can fit in, but how they can change it for the better, and are going on to work in diverse fields ranging from refugee law and resettlement, to human rights and health issues. Are you looking for a career change? Have you considered following your passions to make

UNSW Law Alumni News

a difference but are unsure about the road ahead? UNSW Law is launching a network for alumni who are working in NGOs and ILOs to foster a community where you can connect with like-minded professionals. Join the UNSW Law NGO & ILO Network group on LinkedIn to be part of the conversation and find out more about the different places your law degree can take you.

The UNSW Law Alumni Network asked five UNSW Law graduates working in these sectors to describe what they do and how they got there.

FRANCES VOON (BA/LLB ’96)

Executive Manager, Andrew and Renata Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law, Sydney Frances Voon graduated from UNSW Law in 1996 and completed her MPhil in Development Studies at the University of Oxford. Soon after, she moved to Bangladesh to work with the UN World Food Programme (WFP) which provided food assistance to almost 30,000 Rohingya refugees living in camps near the Bangladesh-Myanmar border. Frances oversaw the WFP’s provision of development assistance to local communities in refugeehosting areas. In 2012, Frances took on the role of Project Director with the Jesuit Refugee Service in Jordan which provides education and psychosocial support to urban refugees from Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, and those recently arriving from Syria. Frances found privilege in working with a team of all refugee staff, watching those who had been displaced for several years provide assistance and support to those struggling from the war in Syria. Frances has also worked in Geneva for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) where she was able to apply her operational experience in the Policy Development and Evaluation Service. Undertaking policy analysis and research on a range of forced migration issues, Frances participated in evaluations of UNHCR operations and was deployed to provide emergency support to UNHCR’s operation in South Sudan, the world’s youngest country, where conflict has

left almost 1.5 million people internally displaced and 500,000 as refugees in neighbouring countries. Frances recently returned to UNSW Law where she is the Executive Manager at the Andrew & Renata Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law. The Centre generates rigorous, policy-relevant research on refugee and forced migration issues in Australia, the Asia-Pacific and internationally. It seeks to provide a link between scholarship and practice, and undertakes community outreach and public engagement. Frances works closely with the Director, UNSW Law Professor Jane McAdam, to oversee and provide strategic direction to the Centre, and contribute to its policy work.

ALLISON CORKERY (BA/LLB ’07) Director, Rights Claiming and Accountability, Centre for Economic and Social Rights, New York

Allison Corkery directs the Rights Claiming and Accountability Program at the Centre for Economic and Social Rights (CESR), an international NGO based in New York. In a world where poverty and inequality deprive entire communities of dignity, justice and sometimes life, CESR strives to uphold the universal rights of education, health, food, water, housing, work, and other rights essential to human dignity. It focuses on exposing violations of economic and social rights using an interdisciplinary combination of legal, political and economic analysis. Through courts, national human rights commissions, regional organisations and United Nations expert and intergovernmental bodies, CESR seeks to hold governments and other power-holders accountable and advocates for fairer socio-economic policies grounded in human rights.

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BEN LUMSDAINE (BA/LLB ’07) Refugee Resettlement Consultant, International Catholic Migration Commission, Sydney Ben Lumsdaine began working at the International Catholic Migration Commission (ICMC) in 2011, his first placement being with the UNHCR field office in Kerman, an ancient city located on a desert plateau in Iran. His role was to identify the most vulnerable Afghan refugees eligible

theories of social change, Corelab has developed a methodology to help organisations identify pathways for change by working back from a set goal they are seeking and by paying close attention to power dynamics. The methodology has been applied successfully to a range of contexts. Corelab has worked with Nobel Prize winner Malala Yousafzai’s Malala Fund, Richard Branson's The B Team, and has helped lead Change.org's global expansion into nearly 20 countries. Corelab has also performed a major review of Transparency International’s contribution to combatting corruption globally. Neither Ed nor May currently practise law yet they consistently engage with how the law is made and how people and organisations ultimately influence rules and practices. Their work gives them the chance to delve deeply into particular issues and contexts, and to bring unlikely allies together to collaborate and influence change.

for resettlement by liaising with Iranian authorities. Ben was responsible for training UNHCR staff to facilitate referrals and interview and assess refugees for resettlement to Norway, Sweden and Australia. In Kerman, Ben found the majority of the refugees considered for resettlement were women at risk. Many were widows or wives of opium addicts subjected to severe violence, others were women without male family members to support them or opportunities for employment. In 2014, Ben began working with ICMC for the UNHCR field office in Kasulu, Tanzania, the centre of a large resettlement operation of Congolese refugees from the Nyarugusu refugee camp. Many Congolese have been in the camp for almost twenty years and have little prospect of returning safely to DRC, placing a burden on the Tanzanian government which recently naturalised over 170,000 Burundian refugees. Ben has found that working handson in a camp provides a very different and unique experience because, in the absence of government services, his work is much more involved in the administration of the daily lives of the people he is helping. In the resettlement context, much of Ben’s work is dedicated to determining custody and the most appropriate family arrangements for resettlement cases. Polygamy is common in the area around Kasulu and women may have children with many fathers, making the task of assigning custody very challenging. Recently Ben found himself travelling back to Kasulu on a bus with Burundian children and their families who were escaping the escalating pre-election violence in Burundi. Working on-site means Ben is now closer to the source of refugees and experiences first-hand the conflicts many people are facing.

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SAVE THE DATE Ngoc Tram Nguyen Scholarship Dinner Friday, 4 September 2015 6:30pm for 7pm start The International Restaurant, Canley Vale Guest Speaker: Professor Ian Jacobs, President and ViceChancellor, UNSW Australia Tickets: $66 available at www.law.unsw.edu.au/ NgocTramNguyen

UNSW Law Alumni Spring Drinks Thursday, 15 October 2015 6:30 – 8:30pm Offices of Minter Ellison, Sydney

Contracts in Commercial Law Conference Friday, 18 and Saturday, 19 December 2015 Art Gallery of New South Wales Guest Speakers: The Hon Justice Susan Kiefel AC, The Hon Chief Justice James Allsop AO, The Hon Chief Justice Tom Bathurst AC, The Hon Justice Andrew Phang, The Rt Hon the Lord Hope KT PC, and Professor Andrew Burrows QC (Hon) FBA DCL. Tickets: contracts.law.unsw.edu.au Total Maximum MCLE Units: 9

Fulfil your CLE points at these upcoming UNSW Law seminars: E-Discovery and Electronic Litigation

Wednesday, 5 August 2015 8:45 – 12:30pm UNSW CBD Campus, Level 6, 1 O’Connell Street, Sydney Register: http://www.cle.unsw.edu.au/ courses-seminars/2015/06/ e-discovery-and-electroniclitigation

Cloud Computing Data Security and Privacy

Thursday, 6 August 2015 8:45 – 12:30pm UNSW CBD Campus, Level 6, 1 O’Connell Street, Sydney Register: http://www.cle.unsw.edu.au/ courses-seminars/2015/06/ cloud-computing-and-datasecurity-update

Visit cle.unsw.edu.au for more details.

Be sure to Like UNSW Law on Facebook to stay updated on alumni news and events throughout the year. facebook.com/ UNSWLaw Visit the UNSW Law YouTube page to learn more about what’s happening at the Law School and in the UNSW Law Alumni Network www.youtube.com/ user/unswlaw/featured

STAY CONNECTED facebook.com/ UNSWLaw law.unsw.edu.au/ LinkedIn youtube.com/ UNSWLaw twitter.com/ UNSWLaw

UNSW Law, UNSW Australia UNSW Sydney, NSW 2052 Australia T +61 2 9385 2227 E lawalumni@unsw.edu.au law.unsw.edu.au/alumni