Andrew Fraser
Andrew Fraser is the principal of Fraser Criminal Law and has worked in criminal law in the Canberra region for more than 15 years. Before beginning legal practice, Andrew was a journalist for close to 30 years with the Canberra Times and the Sydney Morning Herald, including stints in the Federal Parliamentary Press Gallery. He is also a former news editor, chief of staff and political correspondent of the Canberra Times.
Andrew's recent articles
22 April 2025
Trump versus a young man on a mission
Less than three months into the 48 that the world will have to endure his second presidency, Donald Trump is, on a charitable view, now pretty much a caricature of himself.
22 March 2025
Will Walter Sofronoff be prosecuted?
Maybe what Lehrmann Board of Inquiry chair Walter Sofronoff KC did was “serious corrupt conduct”, as the ACT Integrity Commission alleges. Or perhaps that description is “overreach”, as former Law Council of Australia president Arthur Moses SC told The Australian.
10 February 2025
Labor goes weak on reform
When I very briefly and greenly worked for two right-wing members of the second Hawke administration, “pissant” was the faction’s put down of choice.
8 January 2025
Will bail in Victoria get a battering under Battin?
Our annual trip to Queenscliff is a quaint step back in time: ye olde shoppes and seaside fun from a simpler time.
16 December 2024
Just say yes, Minister. It’s prison reform made simple
Many years ago, a number of lawyers lunching with an ACT judicial officer bemoaned their lot as a new Children’s Court Magistrate was rapidly filling the Bimberi Youth Justice Centre with their young clients.
2 December 2024
The prescience of Corporal Hijack
A year ago, Mussa Hijazi, a stone-throwing young teenager of the first Intifada who became a long-serving Canberra lawyer, laid out three options on how the conflict in Gaza would end.
30 November 2024
Inside out: powerful advocates have judges' ears
The ACT Supreme Court was the scene of two uniquely powerful demonstrations of advocacy on the one evening last week.
29 November 2024
War powers reform: no ticker for a no-brainer
Worst of Friends by Suzanne Tripp Jurmain is a simply wonderful book, aimed at “pre-schoolers and up”.
21 November 2024
Bar hits out at Chief Justice
The ACT Bar Association has confronted Chief Justice (CJ) Lucy McCallum over her self-admitted controversial statements about juries in sexual-assault trials.
10 November 2024
Political void: The end of the Wharf
Forty (40) years ago, the ALP ran its national conference at what was then called Noah’s Lakeside Hotel, with uranium, Timor, taxation, David Combe and south-west Tasmania prominent in discussions. But, who is this meeting up on the dancefloor after the day’s debates and double-crossings?
30 October 2024
Clean slate for prison reform
The Canberra community decided on 19 October to remove from its parliament the two most recent ministers for corrections, Mick Gentleman (Labor) and Emma Davidson (Green).
17 October 2024
Absence of care: AMC prison a drug “supermarket”; force applied with “regularity”, report staff
The ACT’s prison is run by a clique, with detainee bashings covered up, staff bullied into silence and the library better labelled “a supermarket” where any drug desired was freely available.
12 October 2024
Sunlight needed to eradicate prison horrors
Reports of malfeasance involving staff at the Alexander Maconochie Centre, the ACT’s supposedly human-rights-compliant prison, are now too numerous and too frequent to lack substantial veracity.
2 June 2024
ACT legal eagles hit out at Chief Justice
The upper echelons of Canberra’s criminal bar are on a collision course with Chief Justice Lucy McCallum over the conduct of sexual-assault trials in the ACT.
24 May 2024
How the ACT Govt is making more people vulnerable
The ACT Labor-Greens coalition is widely seen as the most permissive and truly liberal government in the country.
12 May 2024
Can music conquer all? You bet
“It’s a bit silly in this day and age but that’s how it is.”
10 May 2024
No, Minister. It’s you who should be in court
Even good minds can get criminal justice wrong, but usually for only so long.
22 April 2024
Departure of Justice Richard Refshauge: end of an era
It was a particularly technical legal point. The colleague was an experienced trial advocate with a case in which he felt there was a slim plot of fertile ground on which he might be able to appeal. But he just couldn’t quite work out how all the pieces might come together.
15 April 2024
Labor not tribal enough for three of its own
The ACT Labor-led Government might lead the nation in many worthy ways and it might, too, you might think, especially six months out from an election, be vigilant to avoid what many might see as an embarrassing own goal. But no…
10 April 2024
ACT law reform to be still-born?
ACT Attorney-General Shane Rattenbury might get the feeling that the new Law Reform and Sentencing Advisory Council he established in November last year is channeling Freddie Mercury: they want it all, and they want it now.
3 April 2024
Police chief hits out with compassion
ACT Chief Police Officer Neil Gaughan has expressed alarm at the severe constraints on front-line policing in Canberra while showing great sympathy for principles of drug decriminalisation and raising the age of criminal responsibility.
23 February 2024
Indigenous incarceration
More than a quarter of Canberra's daily average prison population is Indigenous but only 2 per cent of people in the ACT identify as an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person.
18 December 2023
Giving science clout at court, and beyond
Juries seem either to love forensic scientists or just be baffled by them (or by the spin put on their findings by cunning counsel). Some judicial officers have been somewhat slower to embrace them with potentially disastrous consequences, not just in judge-alone trials, but when evidence is ruled inadmissible and does not go to the jury.
30 November 2023
The High Court and the search for a Labor leader
It is more than 20 years since Labor Leader Simon Crean addressed Australian troops leaving to fight in the Bush-Blair-Howard war on Iraq.
25 November 2023
The Rabbi and Corporal Hijack
I met Rabbi Kurt Stone on a bus trip in Europe in 1985, when I was immediately struck by his journalistic pedigree - he covered the Patty Hearst arrests live on radio from underneath a car as bullets flew above.
24 November 2023
Rolls Royce ACT law reform council given Mini Minor resources
The terms of reference for the ACT Law Reform and Sentence Advisory Council are Rolls Royce, but the resources - three public servants - are Mini Minor. While the council is well constructed and will certainly be well led, it needs more horsepower.
30 September 2023
The AFL had the power to turn the tide
My mates and I, growing up in our happy, homogenous and very white suburbia in the 1960s and 70s, would probably not have met an indigenous Australian but for playing footy. Without our great game, we might, at least as kids and teenagers, have remained stuck in the fearful ignorance that was pretty common at the time.
17 September 2023
The Greatest: Vale Ron Barassi
Of the proposition that he was the greatest there can be no doubt.
14 September 2023
Crossing the William Barak Bridge
The woman with the Yes pamphlets outside the MCG on Saturday was unwavering.
31 August 2023
The quiet champions of pill testing preventing harrowing deaths
You have only to walk into Canberras fixed-site pill testing site to have one of the chief criticisms of such schemes palpably refuted.
16 July 2023
The AWM, from behind the Pool of Reflection
As one of the pipers for the Australian War Memorial, I get a unique view of the crowds around the Pool of Reflection during the daily ritual that is the Last Post Ceremony.
6 July 2023
Pillar of ACT judiciary proves our exceptionalism
The ACTs judiciary will henceforth be lacking a meticulous pillar of consistency, but the resignation of Magistrate Beth Campbell allows also pause for reflection on the exceptional criminal courts the Territory has grown across Campbells quarter-century on the bench and indeed across the 34 years since self-government.
16 May 2023
Calvary hospital unresponsive? Yes, Chief Minister
Canberras Calvary Hospital is to be compulsorily acquired by the ACT Government, charged by Chief Minister Andrew Barr with being, amongst other things, unresponsive.
7 May 2023
Scotland a shining example in youth justice
As 2022 closed, WAs main juvenile detention centre, Banksia Hill, grabbed national attention when one of its buildings was burned to the ground by rioting inmates, who scaled the fences in a stand-off with the riot squad.
21 March 2023
Guaranteed protection of home and hearth for next to nothing?
There is a simple, relatively costless government move that should give about half a million Australians confidence in homeland security.
13 December 2022
Lehrmann case: pointing finger at police blows smoke over manifold incongruities
Over 14 years as a criminal defender in Canberra and the region, Ive had hundreds of clients, perhaps a couple of thousand. Im still waiting for the first one who will get the decided benefit of having the police run dead in his or her matter.
31 July 2022
Why the ACT is miles in front
You might not immediately see the correlation between the average Australian politician and the sportspeople who advertise the products of Nike, but the ACT Government is very much living the Just Do It mantra.
23 July 2022
David Pocock's a nice bloke, but ...
Independent Senator David Pocock fronted his first quarterly town hall meeting at the grand old Albert Hall in Canberra with a welter of kindness and concern but there's a bit more to his new job than being nice.
10 July 2022
Pardoning Witness K a no-brainer, but then what?
In this week of fiery church politics, perhaps Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus is doing as the Good Lord himself does moving in mysterious ways.
6 July 2022
What might our new Attorney do with Bernard Collaery?
A 22-year-old speech by the late, long-serving federal and ACT Judge John Gallop provides all that Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus needs to consider in the case of Bernard Collaery and Witness K.
7 March 2022
Presumption of innocence under threat
A citizen's inalienable right to her or his day in court has increasingly become seen as a quaint frivolity by some and a waste of time by many more - but the presumption of innocence is coming under some threat in Australia.
25 September 2021
The counter-revolution that AFL needs
This weekend's AFL Grand Final is only the seventh time that the finals series hasn't included one of the great four: Carlton, Collingwood Richmond and Hawthorn since 1925.
7 August 2021
Bringing 'the Doc' to the masses - review of Gideon Haigh's new book
H. V. Evatt could be a massively polarising figure and that is more than unfortunate. It has closed many minds to what we should be celebrating and promulgating as true Australian values. Those values not merely espoused, but judicially declared and enacted by and because of Evatt are in evidence throughout Gideon Haigh's new book on the Doc: The Brilliant Boy.