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Melbourne man first to be charged under new law banning Nazi salute in Victoria (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 2 years ago by Baku@aussie.zone to c/melbourne@aussie.zone

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[–] SatanicNotMessianic@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Good.

Those who break the law face fines of more than $23,000 or 12 months in prison.

That’s a pretty significant crime if that’s the penalty - it’s certainly more than I would have thought.

To those who know more about Australian law than me, I have two questions:

Is this just a bad write up and that represents the maximum penalty (because it uses the phrase “more than”) and does it mean he will get one or the other? In the US the laws are generally written in the form of “up to $X and up to Y years in prison” or the phrase “no less than…”
What are the chances the charge sticks? I don’t mean he will be found not guilty, I mean is there a challenge to be made against the law itself? Obviously, in the US it would be challenged as an illegal restriction on speech. I think we should be able to pass hate speech laws, but the current interpretation of free speech includes protecting hate speech as political speech

[–] fine_sandy_bottom@aussie.zone 3 points 2 years ago

Not from Victoria and not a lawyer but...

Yes I expect it's "up to $x and up to y years in prison".

I don't really think that there's a challenge to be made against the law itself. We don't have "constitutional free speech". I'm not certain but IIRC the right to criticise the government is enshrined in case law.

It's possible or likely that far right advocacy groups will dream up one or more "test cases". A bit like Rosa Parks where the set of the most favourable circumstances possible are manufactured and then the group puts their weight behind fighting the case in court.

With this strategy they can't really neuter the law but they could get the court to adopt a more generous interpretation of "ought to have known" than the law had intended.

[–] DeltaTangoLima@reddrefuge.com 3 points 2 years ago

For the purpose of this discussion, the law we're talking about is a Victorian law (Victoria being the Australian state where the reported offence is being charged). The penalties for infringement offences in Victoria are defined as a combination of penalty units and/or custodial sentences. Penalty units have a monetary value assigned that is revised annually by the state treasurer. For this particular crime, the penalty is 120 penalty units and/or up to 12 months jail. At the time of writing, 120 penalty units comes to a little over $23,077.
In a sense, yes. If the accused has the resources, they can attempt to appeal to higher courts on a variety of grounds. My personal take on this when they amended the law a few weeks ago to include the Nazi salute was the police would likely only press charges if they were confident enough the evidence would make them stick, rather than risk having to spend half a day in a courthouse only to have a judge decide the offender was simply hailing a cab.