ABSTRACT At first glance, Part 3–1 of the Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth) seems to overlap with long-established anti-discrimination laws, offering protection against adverse, attribute-based conduct in employment. On close analysis, however, it turns out to be a new and quite different regime. Although the Fair Work Act offers a simple alternative to dated and complicated anti-discrimination laws, its provisions are at times overly-simple, raising uncertainty about how they will operate. Our analysis leads us to conclude that the approach to discrimination protection in the Fair Work Act, while an important addition to the remedies available to Australian workers, is compromised by failing to take account of lessons learned in the long history of anti-discrimination law.

Clinical legal education (CLE) is a significant method of learning and teaching in law. It is intensive, often one-on-one in nature and exhibits a justified expectation that students, who are commonly self-selecting, will ‘do well’ as they apply legal theory and develop lawyering skills to solve simulated and real-client legal problems. Clinical pedagogy involves a system of self-critique and supervisory feedback so that law students learn how to learn from their experience. The high staff-student ratio and collaborative learning environments support a climate in which each student is motivated to improve and perform at their best. In its common focus on real clients, students are motivated by the inescapable personal responsibility of working with and being accountable to those clients, to perform to the best of their ability. The result for participating students is a profound consolidation of substantive legal knowledge with the practicalities, compromises and successes of contemporary legal practice.
This project has involved an in-depth 27-month investigation of all identifiable Australian CLE programs. The project has confirmed to team members that, while there is a growing consciousness of the advantages of CLE to law schools and law students, there is still only a very limited awareness in conventional academia of the transforming potential of CLE – a long-term strategy to lift the reputation and hence the international ranking of many law schools. In a globalising legal education environment where clinical methods are increasingly becoming integral to the high-quality legal education landscape, it is a matter of regret that the funding of Australian legal education does not prioritise clinical approaches within law curricula, let alone seek the integration of clinical methodology into those curricula.
In the expectation that this state of affairs must change (and in order to provoke that change), this project has galvanised clinical supervisors’ opinions around Australia and identified an extensive number of best practices for Australian CLE. These best practices constitute the recommendations arising from the project, and are organised under seven themes comprising Course Design, Law in Context in a Clinical Setting, Reflective Student Learning, Assessment, Supervision, Staff and Infrastructure.