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Political corruption affects each nation-state differently, but the outcomes are nominally the same: a deficit of public trust, weakened government institutions and undermined political systems. This article analyzes issues of political corruption in Australia by framing them within a Na-tional Integrity Ecosystem (NIE) and addressing them against the proposed Commonwealth In-tegrity Commission (CIC) 2020 bill. It explores the prevalent 'grey' areas of Australian political corruption where they interact with the private sector - political donations, the revolving door, and lobbying. This article argues for their inclusion within the mandated scope of the proposed CIC. There is a need for strong legislation, both domestic and international, to fight corruption. This article then discusses the application of the provisions of the draft Anticorruption Protocol to the UN Convention Against Corruption (APUNCAC) that may apply with respect to these 'grey' issues, and how an International Anti-Corruption Court may provide another institutional model for Australia to follow. Finally, this article links these proposals to the 2021 UN General Assem-bly Special Session (UNGASS) on Corruption and the 9th Conference of States Parties on UNCAC (COSP9), events that illustrate multilateral momentum and progress on anti-corruption. As a country that has historically supported the UN multilateral framework and its institutions, this article recommends a proactive approach for Australia so that the passing of a strong domestic anticorruption initiative will contribute to the adoption, and eventual ratification, of APUNCAC.

© 2017, © The Author(s) 2017. The stigmatisation, control, criminalisation and incarceration of people with disability have a long history. While in recent decades there has been increasing commitment to the rights of people with disabilities by governments in western nations, the over-representation of people with mental and cognitive disability in criminal justice systems has continued. Although there are similarities amongst Western jurisdictions in regard to the treatment of people with disability in justice systems, there are particularities in Australia that will be drawn out in this article. We argue that disadvantaged people with mental and cognitive disability are being managed by and entrenched in criminal justice systems across Australia's six states and two territories, including so-called diversionary and therapeutic measures that appear to accommodate their disability. In the absence of early and appropriate diagnosis, intervention and support in the community, some disadvantaged and poor persons with mental and cognitive disability, in particular Indigenous Australians, are being systematically criminalised. Criminal justice agencies and especially youth and adult prisons have become normalised as places of disability management and control. Drawing on research that focuses in detail on the jurisdictions of the Northern Territory and New South Wales, we argue for a reconstruction of the understanding of and response to people with these disabilities in the criminal justice system.

Community sanctions involving supervision are a neglected field in criminological research and are widely viewed in political, media and public discourse as 'not prison' and a 'let-off'. An important new book, Pervasive Punishment by Fergus McNeill (2019), redresses this neglect by attempting to 'make sense of mass supervision' as a lived experience. Utilising a short story and allied projects with supervisees involving photographs and songs, he constructs a 'counter-visual' criminology that elucidates the ways supervision constitutes 'pervasive punishment'. This article reviews McNeill's argument and assesses its applicability in the Australian context.

While rape historically remains underreported all over the globe, and criminal justice factors contribute to this problem, we investigate unique circumstances that might influence reporting inclinations by Hungarian victims of sexual violence. Among other possible factors, victim-blaming, institutional desensitization, and a lack of trust in the criminal justice system and in the community are discussed. The in-depth interviews (n = 22) with law enforcement and criminal justice professionals conducted in 2018 in Hungary reveal roots of underreporting in the complexities of the criminal justice system: there is a failure to prioritize victims needsmental care services, physical and privacy protectionand a focus instead on solely providing legal justice. The further deficits that can be found among professionals attitudes and behaviors in the courtroom are products of the following: a lack of standardized protocols in addressing the needs of victims; a dearth of technical and evidence-based knowledge and training; a lack of supervision and trauma-informed services to practitioners; high caseloads; a focus on the goal of high conviction rates; not providing open communication toward victims; and a shortage of standardized protocols in dealing with victims. ; Published version

This article examines some of the limits of reporting schemes as a tool for addressing business-related human rights risks and for engaging business in a collaborative effort to improve human rights. Australia's Modern Slavery Act 2018 (Cth) (MSA) is the latest example globally of a legislative scheme intended to foster corporate action on such risks within businesses' operations and supply chains. Some such schemes require firms to implement human rights due diligence (HRDD) measures, as envisaged by the 2011 UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. However, the MSA's model is best described as a disclosure or reporting regime. Such regimes do not require businesses to take HRDD measures; rather, they only require businesses to report on any such measures that they have taken during the relevant reporting period. In this article, we analyse some of the assumptions underlying the design of reporting-based schemes. We then consider one practice used by firms facing supply chain scrutiny: social auditing. We caution against an over-reliance on this practice, which is not synonymous with HRDD. It does not necessarily promote fulsome, non-cosmetic reporting compliance or foster corporate action on underlying human rights risks. We finally offer some alternative approaches that could improve the effectiveness of measures to address human rights risks in supply chains.

It is inevitable that some people granted conditional release will (re)offend, but most will complete their order without incident. Nevertheless, the standard approach adopted by correctional agencies to communicating with the public about community corrections is one of minimal information. We suggest that this may create an impression that offenders are dark shadowy figures incapable of change or redemption. To address this, we set out an agenda for Australian governments to build public confidence in community corrections. We call for more robust program evaluation, publication of the results and regular updates on trends in successful order completion. We also highlight the importance of educating the public about crime and corrections and the need to improve the credibility of community corrections. Finally, governments should do more to humanise offenders. The public has a right to know more about how offenders are managed in the community. They also deserve to hear the stories behind the statistics.

Elder rights are the new frontier in the pluralisation of humanrights yet they have been a largely neglected area of research. TheUnited Nations (UN) has started to seriously consider establishinga Convention on the Rights of Older Persons through the Open-Ended Working Group on Ageing (OEWGA). Through qualitativeand quantitative analyses of documents from the OEWGA andinterviews with elder rights activists, this article examines therights claims and subgroups of older persons that have beengiven primacy. It also identifies forces that have shaped the rightsdiscourse and the implications of the dominant themes for howolder persons are perceived. It argues that the political divisionsand the rules of the OEWGA have prevented a consistently com-prehensive discussion on the rights of older persons. It also arguesthat there is a risk that the emphasis on economic and social rightsand older persons with disabilities by states and non-state actorsmight subtly reinforce the notion that elderly people are a drainon resources, a burden, and objects of welfare rather than asactive contributors to societies. It concludes by proposing possibleways of avoiding these pitfalls and suggestions on widening thescope of the rights discussion and future research.

In Australia, eight of the nine legal jurisdictions have enacted 'deemed supply' provisions for illicit drug trafficking offences that presume 'intent to supply' based on the quantity of a drug an alleged offender is found with and attach criminal liability for the offence of supply. Such laws have been enacted for more than 35 years. In this article we critically examine: the rationale for the widespread adoption of Australian deemed supply laws; and the justifiability and necessity of such laws in current legal practice. A legal and historical analysis was undertaken. Data were sourced from legislation, Parliamentary records (Hansard), case law, published research on international drug law, research on drug user behaviour and our own experience in the prosecution of drug offenders. Analysis shows that Australian deemed supply laws were introduced to overcome perceived difficulties in the prosecution and sanction of drug traffickers. Yet such laws conflict with the dominant international practice that sanctions trafficking without the use of deemed supply provisions. They contribute towards harms to users and miscarriages of justice and increase pressure to use police and prosecutorial discretion in ways that may ultimately adversely affect community confidence in the administration of the criminal law. We conclude that the laws should be subject to legislative review and/or, preferably, abolition from Australian drug trafficking law.

Multinational businesses are facing mounting pressure to identify and address risks of exploitation, trafficking and modern slavery in their supply chains. Digital worker reporting tools present unprecedented opportunities for lead firms to reach out directly to hard-to-reach workers for feedback on their working conditions via their mobile phone. These new technologies promise an efficient and cost-effective way to cut through the complexity of global production, gathering unmediated data on working conditions directly from workers at scale. As the market for these tools grows, this paper contextualises their emergence within the broader political economy of supply chain governance. It presents three sets of concerns about their use that must be addressed by businesses, investors, donors and governments that develop or utilise these tools. First, the quality of data gathered by these tools may be inadequate to reliably inform decision-making. Second, global brands may gather large quantities of worker data to identify legal, reputational and financial risks without addressing structural causes of exploitation or delivering outcomes for workers. Third, large scale collection of data from workers creates new risks for workers' wellbeing and safety.

Background: Cross-agency administrative data can improve cost-effective triage systems for child protection and other human service delivery. Objective: To determine the minimum set of cross-agency indicators that could accurately classify placement in out-of-home-care (OOHC)before age 13–14 years. Participants and setting: Participants were 72,079 Australian children (mean age = 13.16 years; SD = 0.37; 51.4% male)and their parents, for whom linked administrative records spanning the years 1994–2016 were available for analysis within the 'New South Wales Child Development Study'. Methods: First, a series of logistic regression analyses were conducted to examine associations between cross-agency (health, justice, education)risk indicators and membership of the sub-cohort of 1239 children who had an OOHC placement prior to age 13–14 years, relative to (1)the sub-cohort of 55,473 children who had no previous contact with child protection services, and (2)the sub-cohort of 15,367 children who had been reported to child protection services but had no record of OOHC placement. We then explored the classification characteristics associated with a smaller combination of risk factors, and the utility of specific familial risk factors, for classifying membership of the OOHC subgroup. Results: A combination of six risk indicators evident before OOHC placement can classify children placed in OOHC with approximately 95% accuracy, and the presence of at least four of these risk indicators provides excellent specificity (99.6%). Conclusions: A combination of risk factors observable in administrative datasets held by multiple government agencies may be used to target support services to prevent entry into OOHC for children from vulnerable families.

Constitutions are an important feature of many authoritarian regimes. But what role do they in fact perform in processes of authoritarian regime stabilization and legitimation? Much of the contemporary literature focuses on authoritarian constitutionalism in transitions away from liberal constitutional democracy. This article considers the opposite scenario: pre-emptive constitution-making as a mechanism of authoritarian constitutionalism to contain a potential transition towards liberal constitutional democracy. This is illustrated through the case of Myanmar. Since the 1960s, Myanmar has experienced successive periods of direct military rule without a constitution, followed since 2011 by a new constitution. Adding to the comparative literature on constitutions in authoritarian regimes, this article explains how pre-emptive constitution-making limits a transition to liberal democracy and contributes to authoritarian-regime resilience. This article further identifies 'military-state' constitutionalism as a variation of authoritarian constitutionalism in Myanmar. The case of Myanmar offers comparative insights into the ways constitutions are used to contain transitions to liberal constitutional democracy and illustrates the varieties inherent in authoritarian constitutionalism.

In 2016, the South Australian Government proposed expanding the use of Home Detention ('HD') sentences. A key concern of government and community alike regarding HD sentences has to do with the eligibility of prisoners for the sanction and, more specifically, the likelihood that individuals serving HD sentences will pose a threat to public safety when they are serving their sentences in the community. The aim of the current study was to establish baseline empirical evidence about: (a) the profile of prisoners serving HD sentences in the state; (b) factors associated with breaches of HD sentences; and, (c) the nature and extent of reoffending by prisoners serving HD sentences. The sample consists of a cohort of prisoners released to HD in South Australia between June 2014 and June 2015 who were followed until June 2017. The results show that the most robust predictors of breaches of HD orders and returns to custody were risk assessments while prisoners were in custody. Furthermore, prisoners convicted of violent offences who received a HD sentence were less likely to return to custody compared to those who committed non-violent offences. Finally, the vast majority of offences for which prisoners returned to custody following a HD order were administrative offences.

Purpose - Injecting drug use is a global concern, with an estimated 16 million people who inject drugs (PWIDs) in over 148 countries. A number of Asian countries detain PWIDs for compulsory treatment. The paper aims to discuss this issue. Design/methodology/approach - The authors reviewed the literature on compulsory drug treatment in seven Asian countries. Findings - The authors identified 1,269 closed settings which held over 600,000 drug users in eight countries. The average detainee was aged from 20 to 30 years and was predominantlymale. HIV risk behaviour continued in detention in some countries. In most countries treatment comprised physical labour,military drills. Methadone maintenance treatment and antiretroviral therapy were rarely available. No data were located to show detention in a closed setting treated drug dependency. Issues of concern were; no due legal process for the detention of drug users, lack of evidence-based drug treatment, lack of HIV prevention and treatment, abusive conditions, forced labour and exercise, arbitrary exit procedures and very high relapse rates. Research limitations/implications - The review of compulsory treatment of drug users failed to find any evaluation of effective drug treatment for detainees. Instead serious breaches in human rights conditions were evident. Prominent international organisations have called for the compulsory treatment of drug users to cease. Practical implications - Many countries are spending vast amounts of funding on ineffective treatments for drug users. Social implications - Funding should be directed to community-based drug treatments that have been shown to work. Originality/value - This is the largest review of compulsory treatment of drug users to date.

This article considers the Australian response to new global migra- tion flows with a focus on irregular migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. The effects of temporary status and invisibility on lived experience and on social and legal norms are explored, with the off-shore processing of asylum seekers at the extreme end of state policies of externalising borders and irregular migrants. The article problematises the official categorisation of migrants into adminis- trative and legal domains and the consequent construction of a normative hierarchy of good and bad migrants. In the Australian context, political narratives of deserving and undeserving migrants and of asylum seekers as disturbing the ordered migration system are used to justify the need for the protection and security of the nation. The article argues that articulations of a just society and the spread of human rights are weakened through such official narratives of fear and rejection that dehumanise irregular migrants such as asylum seekers, and highlights the work of civil society organisations in attempting democratic accountability.

This paper charts the main changes in security industry regulation in Australia from the 1980s to the present time, and provides a critique of the regulatory framework and the change process. Change has largely been driven by recurring conduct scandals, with governments obliged to introduce increasingly more stringent integrity checks and competency standards in an attempt to diminish widespread concerns about the industry. Despite the lack of strategic planning, a significant learning process is evident and a clear model of best practice has emerged. Recent enquiries show that Australia still does not have an optimal system for managing the industry but change has been in the right direction, with scope for fine-tuning to ensure more responsive and effective regulation.