Unions NSW is excited to announce that our next Industrial Seminar will be a panel event on Wednesday 26 June. The purpose of the seminar series in 2019 is to share knowledge and experience from within the union movement on legal, industrial and campaign activities. Everyone is welcome to attend, and we would like to encourage as broad an audience as possible.

The seminar will focus on the High Court decision of Unions NSW & Ors v State of NSW handed down in January of this year. The case concerned a challenge to two provisions of the Electoral Funding Act 2018 (NSW) that severely restricted the amount of money unions could spend during NSW election campaigns, as well as their ability to run joint campaigns, on the basis that these provisions impermissibly burdened the implied freedom of political communication under the Constitution.

Our panel of speakers will include:

• Nicholas Owens SC, one of the barristers who ran the case, who has particular expertise in public law (administrative and constitutional law)
• Professor George Williams AO, an academic specialising in Australian constitutional law and Dean of the Law Faculty at the University of New South Wales; and
• Professor Anne Twomey, an expert in the field of constitutional law and the Director of the Constitutional Reform Unit at the University of Sydney.

The seminar will focus on how the case was run and the decision, the implications of the case and the questions that remain unanswered.