As it happened: High Court dismisses immigration detainee challenge; Treasurer wants Australians to have more babies

Coalition home affairs spokesman James Paterson said it would’ve been “catastrophic” if the High Court ruled in favour of a bisexual Iranian man, given the pseudonym ASF17, who claimed he was being unlawfully held in immigration detention.

The case was regarded as a legal sequel to last year’s landmark High Court ruling that outlawed indefinite detention, which resulted in 153 detainees being freed. The latest legal challenge would have seen up to 200 more immigration detainees released into the community.

“It’s a very sensible decision and we welcome it, because the alternative decision would have been catastrophic for Australia’s system of immigration detention,” Paterson told the ABC on Friday afternoon.

The government should now take the time to reconsider deportation laws it tried to rush through before Easter, Paterson said.

Immigration Minister Andrew Giles introduced a bill in March threatening up to five years jail for uncooperative detainees, and banning entire nationalities from visiting Australia if their country refused to accept citizens being involuntarily returned.

“This bill gives extraordinary, unfettered powers to the minister for immigration,” Paterson said. “For example, he can declare an entire nation of people to be a designated country of concern, and that means no one can apply for any visa unless they fit in a very narrow category of exemptions.

“We think there should be some guardrails put around that power.”

The Coalition is demanding an overhaul of the deportation bill and has proposed 17 amendments in exchange for its support.

The Federal Court has dismissed two shareholder class actions against the Commonwealth Bank over what it told investors about its compliance with anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing (AML/CTF) laws before bombshell legal action was launched against the bank in 2017.

A landmark case from regulator AUSTRAC in 2017 sparked heavy falls in CBA’s share price, prompting law firm Maurice Blackburn to launch a class action alleging the bank knew about major AML/CTF failings in years before the AUSTRAC case, but had failed to properly disclose these to investors.

CBA settled the case with AUSTRAC in 2018 for $700 million, which at the time was a record corporate penalty in Australia.

Maurice Blackburn’s case, which later joined with a separate class action from litigation firm Phi Finney McDonald, focused on what CBA had disclosed to investors before AUSTRAC took CBA to court.

The actions alleged that between mid-2014 and when the AUSTRAC case was launched in August 2017, CBA had information about what were later found to be breaches of the AML/CTF laws, and it was claimed CBA had breached its continuous disclosure obligations.

The cases also claimed that if the information about AML/CTF compliance had been disclosed on the ASX, it would have had a “material” effect on CBA’s share price.

But on Friday, Federal Court Justice David Yates found in favour of CBA, ruling that even though the bank was aware of problems with its AML/CTF systems before AUSTRAC’s 2017 case, it had not breached its continuous disclosure obligations. Justice Yates also said he was not satisfied that this information, if it had been released to the market, would be likely to influence people investing in CBA shares.

Read the full story.

In New York, Stormy Daniels has finished testifying in Donald Trump’s criminal trial, capping a tumultuous day and a half of courtroom accusations, denials and counter-accusations that infuriated Trump, briefly raised the risk of a mistrial and left the jury to decide whether the adult-film actress’s tale of secret sex should matter in a financial crimes case.

Daniels first took the stand on Tuesday, describing in sometimes disturbing language what she said was an evening in 2006 when she and the businessman turned reality TV star had sex in a Lake Tahoe hotel.

Trump, the former president who is also the presumptive Republican nominee, listened intently to what she said, at times reacting so audibly that the judge warned his lawyers that he could be intimidating the witness and must stop.

When Daniels returned to the witness stand on Thursday (Friday AEST), it was to face off against Trump lawyer Susan Necheles, who took a no-holds-barred approach to challenging the porn actress’ credibility on a host of issues.

Read the full story from The Washington Post.

It wasn’t quite as catchy as Peter Costello’s “one for mum, one for dad and one for the country” baby-bonus-infused quip, but Jim Chalmers touched a nerve with his overt support for the right of people to have larger families.

Chalmers said it would be “better if birth rates were higher” while noting there were several factors behind the drop in Australia’s fertility rate.

The issue nations are facing is that many young people are making the choice not to have a child.

Our fertility rate fell to a record low of 1.59 during the early stages of COVID-19. While some predicted a post-pandemic baby boom, it was more a whimper than a bang. Fertility barely lifted and appears to have started easing again.

According to the research in The Lancet, it is forecast to drop to 1.45 by 2050, and 1.32 by 2100.

Some argue that Australia should shut off immigration. If that were to happen, Australia would quickly feel the pressures that countries such as China, South Korea and Japan are now experiencing, which is a fall in their total population.

Growing populations put strains on a country’s infrastructure and environment. A falling population puts a strain on the entire economic system.

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Bonza’s administrators have told some of the airline’s 60,000 creditors there is an outside chance the company could be saved, with multiple “interest parties” including investors, other airlines and travel companies in talks.

“We are unable to provide further information as these discussions are commercially sensitive,” Hall Chadwick partner Richard Albarran said on Friday. He confirmed the administrators are considering selling the airline or liquidating it.

Albarran also confirmed the federal government is unlikely to provide any financial assistance.

“The Queensland government is considering its position so hopefully there will be some assistance but we can’t say what that looks like. They want to know what’s the strategy for Bonza, who’s the purchaser – there’s a few things to be dealt with.”

Bonza currently owes about $115 million to about 60,000 creditors. The bulk of this amount is owed to private equity owner 777 Partners, with the remaining owed to staff, airports, ground handling companies, and passengers.

Hall Chadwick is still unclear as to whether any of the passengers will receive refunds, or whether the company traded while insolvent, but said it continues to investigate both matters. A credit report is expected next month.

The judge who presided over Bruce Lehrmann’s high-stakes defamation case has ordered the former Liberal staffer to pay a significant portion of Network Ten and Lisa Wilkinson’s legal costs after he found Lehrmann had brought the case on a “fanciful” and “knowingly false” premise.

Federal Court Justice Michael Lee indicated earlier this month that he would order Lehrmann to pay some of Ten’s legal costs after it successfully defended Lehrmann’s suit against the network and Lisa Wilkinson over an interview with Brittany Higgins aired on The Project in February 2021.

Lee ruled on Friday on whether the order would be made on an indemnity basis, which covers about 90 per cent of a winning party’s legal bill, or the ordinary basis, which results in a successful party recouping about 70 per cent of their costs.

He said at the beginning of his judgment, delivered in Sydney, that there were “no real winners in this litigation”.

Lee ordered Lehrmann to pay Ten and Wilkinson’s costs of their successful truth defence on an indemnity basis. However, he ordered Lehrmann to cover the costs of their fallback qualified privilege defence, which was rejected, on an ordinary basis.

Read the full story here.

Australia’s eSafety Commissioner has accused Elon Musk’s X Corp of hypocrisy in how it has dealt with an Australian order to remove videos of last month’s stabbing of a Sydney priest.

An interlocutory hearing is being held in the Federal Court to determine the validity of the watchdog’s order to block dozens of posts showing the alleged terror attack.

eSafety is arguing X, in order to comply with Australian law, should have blocked the videos even for those using networks obscuring their location.

X argued this would constitute a global takedown order whereby an Australian regulator was determining the content viewable overseas.

But eSafety’s lawyer, Tim Begbie KC, said the social media firm’s policies showed they sometimes issue global takedown orders.

“Global removal is reasonable when X does it because X wants to do it, but it becomes unreasonable when X is told to do it by the law of Australia,” he said.

Begbie said the parties were at odds on whether the video, in which the priest is stabbed but does not die, constituted so-called “class one” material so shocking that it was worthy of being removed.

Thank you for tuning into our live coverage, I’ll be handing over to Angus Dalton who will anchor the blog for the rest of the day.

Here what we’ve covered so far, if you’re just catching up:

• Australia’s highest court dismissed a bisexual Iranian man’s legal challenge to be released from immigration detention.
• Only 76 of the 153 released detainees from the November High Court ruling that indefinite immigration detention was illegal are wearing electronic monitoring devices, according to Australian Border Force data.
• Prime Minister Anthony Albanese vowed that no federal money will flow to gas companies as a result of a policy promoting new fossil fuel projects to plug a supply shortage.
• Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong has labelled some of the protests about the war in Gaza on university campuses as antisemitic.
• Treasurer Jim Chalmers says his government wants to make it easier for Australians to have bigger families if they chose to.
• Overseas, former president Donald Trump’s youngest son has been named as a Republican delegate to represent Florida at the party’s national convention this summer.