The High Court unanimously resolved how ordinary income from employment is attributed to fortnightly instalment periods under the youth allowance income test when a recipient's pay cycle does not align with the statutory reporting period — holding that the disjunctive phrase 'first earned, derived or received' in point 1067G-H23 provides three independent temporal bases, any one of which suffices.
The High Court unanimously held that police officers who positively intervene in a crowd situation owe a duty to exercise reasonable care to avoid physical injury to bystanders foreseeably at risk from the operational response, and that statutory police powers do not displace that common law duty.
The High Court unanimously restored awards of $200,000 in exemplary damages to each of four youth detainees subjected to unlawful CS gas deployment at the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre, holding that the Northern Territory was directly liable — not merely vicariously liable — for the institutional systems and decisions that facilitated the tortious conduct.
The High Court unanimously refused to recognise a novel common law defence that would have immunised Commonwealth officers and the Commonwealth from liability for false imprisonment where detention was conducted under statutory provisions whose validity had been upheld by a prior High Court decision later overruled. The decision affirms that invalid legislation confers no rights and affords no protection ab initio, that judicial declarations operate retroactively, and that the executive's constitutional responsibility to comply with the law cannot be converted into an immunity from the consequences of exceeding lawful authority.
The High Court has resolved a long-contested question in Division 7A of the ITAA 1936: a private company beneficiary's failure to demand payment of an unpaid present entitlement from a discretionary trust does not constitute a 'loan' to the trustee — whether as 'financial accommodation' under s 109D(3)(b) or as a transaction 'in substance' effecting a loan under s 109D(3)(d).
The High Court unanimously held that where Australia has exercised its right of reservation under Art 18(1)(a) of the Convention on Limitation of Liability for Maritime Claims (1976) to exclude Art 2(1)(d) and (e), claims for wreck removal are not limitable under the Convention at all — even if they also fall within Art 2(1)(a) as claims for loss of or damage to property. The reservation operates on an "all or nothing" basis.
The High Court unanimously resolved conflicting approaches to the honest concurrent use defence under the Trade Marks Act 1995 (Cth), holding that honesty must be proved at the date of each alleged infringement — not at filing or trial — and that 'honest' requires a subjective state of mind measured against the standards of ordinary, decent people.
The High Court held 4-3 that framing a tendency in terms replicating charged conduct and relying exclusively on evidence of charged acts from a single complainant is not inconsistent with the nature of tendency evidence and does not invite impermissible circular reasoning. A tendency direction inviting findings on charged conduct to a lesser standard does not of itself constitute a miscarriage of justice; the test is whether the summing up as a whole gave rise to a real risk of undermining the jury's understanding of proof beyond reasonable doubt.
The High Court unanimously held that a judge who makes strongly adverse credibility findings at the liability stage of a bifurcated civil penalty proceeding is not thereby disqualified from hearing the penalty stage. The perceived tension between orthodox recusal principles and the standard practice of bifurcation is misplaced: there can be no reasonable apprehension of bias from an apprehension that a judge might do exactly what the judge is permitted to do.
The High Court unanimously varied its own orders to remit a costs issue to the Court of Appeal, after recognising it had overlooked a footnote in the appellants' written submissions. The decision restates the stringent conditions under which the power to correct an accidental slip or omission will be exercised.
The High Court unanimously held that a conspiracy to commit misconduct in public office may be described by reference to cumulative characteristics of contemplated acts, rejecting the contention that the prosecution must allege agreement to do particular specified acts amounting to the predicate offence.