Kicking goals in November

A message from the Executive Dean of Law and Business Professor Andrew O'Neil.

Planning is well advanced for the Thomas More Law School’s (TMLS) 10-year anniversary celebration, ‘A Decade of Excellence’, which will be held in Melbourne on 28 November. This will be a wonderful opportunity to celebrate the achievements of the TMLS while looking ahead to the school’s next 10 years.

Meanwhile, the development of the new Bachelor of Business program continues to push the boundaries of innovation and has received positive feedback from alumni, students, professional industry associations, and industry. Scheduled for introduction in 2026, the Bachelor of Business will be an exciting addition to ACU’s undergraduate program portfolio.

The Faculty of Law and Business (FLB) continues to achieve significant impact in research, teaching, and external engagement. This is reflected in a selection of recent impressive wins by FLB academic colleagues.

ACU’s Teaching Development Grants Scheme is designed to support scholarship of teaching and learning, program and curriculum initiatives, and innovation in higher education teaching and learning. In a highly competitive annual round this year, two projects based in the TMLS were funded - both led by early career academics:

Dr Perla Guarneros-Sanchez, Kunle Ola and John Mahoney
‘Fostering ACU student engagement through cross-cultural experience interdisciplinary collaboration and international exchange using Collaborate Online International Learning’.

Dr Anne Pickering, Kunle Ola, Zaman Khorseduzzaman
‘Transforming legal education through co-designing innovative, industry-aligned, and technology-advanced curricula to develop ethical, efficient, and future-ready law graduates’

Formed in 2010, the Australian Discrimination Law Experts Group (ADLEG) is a select group of legal academics who specialise in discrimination law and practice - Dr Bill Swannie was invited to join in 2019. ADLEG contributes regularly to law reform submissions and consults with government stakeholders on legislative reform. As a member of ADLEG, Dr Swannie assisted in a submission to the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee and in early 2024 provided evidence to the committee in relation to the Australian Human Rights Commission Amendment (Costs Protection) Bill. The Bill recognised that not every respondent in an unlawful discrimination proceeding will be well-resourced and that some will be disadvantaged in having to pay significant legal costs if their claims are unsuccessful. Passed on 19 September, and reflecting the submission and evidence provided by ADLEG, the new Act prevents a court from ordering an applicant to pay a respondent’s costs in discrimination cases in the Federal Court except in certain limited circumstances.

Dr Walayat Hussain, Dr Mehdi Rajaeian, and Dr Mahmoud Bekhit have successfully secured a grant of $122,868 (including in-kind contributions) from the Australian Government's Department of Education’s Higher Education Participation and Partnerships Program (HEPPP) for their project titled: ‘Pathway to possibilities through empowering underrepresented students with interactive gamified robotics programming’.

Criminology early career researcher Dr Stefani Vasil is the co-author of a book that was published by Routledge in October entitled The Borders of Violence: Temporary Migration and Domestic and Family Violence. The book explores the structural harm of borders and non-citizenship, specifically temporary non-citizenship, in the perpetuation of domestic and family violence. It focuses on the stories and situations of over 300 women in Australia. The analysis foregrounds how the state and the migration system both sustain and enable violence against women. In doing so the book demonstrates how structural violence is an insidious component of gendered violence – limiting and curtailing women’s safety. The book offers key insights for professionals, policy makers, stakeholders, and advocates working broadly to support temporary non-citizens and/or to address and eliminate violence against women.