News and Events

DIRTY dishes in the sink, leaving the toilet seat up? Almost everyone has a bad flatmate story but these ones really take the cake.

In inner-city Sydney, a man in his 50s answers an unexpected knock at the front door. It’s the police, carrying a DNA sample kit and some paperwork. A document explains to the man that he has been classified as an untested former offender, empowering the police to collect his DNA.

In Australia, unfair and oppressive rules introduced by some apartment buildings have seen a number of tenants summarily locked out of their homes, often over trivial matters. These tenants have found that local laws offer them little in the way of meaningful protection.

Following a fire in an overcrowded property in Alexandria on July 2, the City Hub has identified a series of up to 150 unauthorised boarding houses throughout the city, all of which appear to be part of a single operation.

RLC Tenant Advocate, Tom McDonald, was on the ABC’s program, The Checkout, this month giving practical advice to tenants in relation to keeping their bond at the end of their tenancy.

Plans to expand NSW police powers would encourage officers to arrest people for spurious reasons and to hold them in custody even if they face only financial penalties, legal experts have warned.

THE charging of domestic violence victims who retract allegations should be approved only at the highest levels of state police forces or by directors of public prosecution, says the Australian Law Reform Commission.

RLC's Police Powers solicitor, David Porter, spoke with Eleanor Bell on ABC Radio National's PM show, on measures to address youth crime.

The impulsive need to condemn is a reaction to our inability to describe why riots happen in some disadvantaged areas and not others. We should be making a concerted effort to separate the process of identifying and punishing criminal acts from understanding why they happen, particularly on a large scale. Instead we get the constant insistence that people are rational moral actors — and that violence has no place in a reasonable society.