George Newhouse is an Australian human rights lawyer and a former local councillor.
39 Facts About George Newhouse
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George Newhouse is the principal solicitor of the National Justice Project, a human rights and social justice legal service, and currently an Adjunct Professor of Law at Macquarie University.
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George Newhouse was the Mayor of Waverley in the eastern suburbs of Sydney from 2006 to 2007, and the Labor candidate for the seat of Wentworth at the 2007 Australian federal election.
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George Newhouse became an accredited mediator and was a member of the Consumer Trader Tenancy Tribunal from 1999 to 2007 and a mediator for the Workers Compensation Commission from 2001 to 2010.
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George Newhouse co-founded the National Justice Project in 2016 with Dan Mori and Duncan Fine.
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George Newhouse is well known in Australia for his human rights work with refugees, former Immigration detainees and Aboriginal Australians.
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George Newhouse represented Vivian Solon, who was deported from Australia to the Philippines; Cornelia Rau, who was detained in an Australian detention centre for ten months; the Sudanese Dafurian community, and the family of the late Richard Niyonsaba.
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George Newhouse has acted for Tamil, Chinese, Palestinian and Iranian asylum seekers following the Rau and Solon cases.
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In June 2010 George Newhouse represented Tamil asylum seekers in their complaint to the Australian Human Rights Commission regarding the suspension of the processing of their visas; which have subsequently been processed.
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In February 2011 George Newhouse was successful in securing the release of Seena Akhlaqi Sheikhdost, an orphan whose parents had died in a shipwreck on Christmas Island from immigration detention.
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George Newhouse facilitated a family with two vulnerable children to be moved from Inverbrackie Detention Centre in Adelaide to community detention in Sydney.
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George Newhouse has championed the use of the Commonwealth's common law duty of care to have children released from fenced detention.
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In 2011 in the WA Coroner's Court, George Newhouse represented the survivors and relatives of those who died in the 2010 Christmas Island boat disaster; and he represented the next of kin of one of the three suicides in Villawood before the NSW Coroner.
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George Newhouse obtained an injunction to stop the first Afghan asylum seeker to be forcibly returned to Afghanistan.
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George Newhouse fought for the rights of those indefinitely detained in immigration detention to be released or to have their adverse ASIO determinations reviewed.
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In February 2017 the National Justice Project, under the direction of George Newhouse, was successful, in obtaining an injunction to stop the Minister for Immigration from implementing a blanket policy to remove the mobile phones of all detainees in Immigration Detention.
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In 2006 George Newhouse worked with the Mutitjulu Aboriginal Community to overturn the decision of the Howard Government to impose an Administrator over the Mutitjulu Community Aboriginal Corporation on the basis that the decision was ultra vires, or beyond the power of the decision maker.
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In January 2009 George Newhouse advised Barbara Shaw and the Prescribed Areas Peoples Alliance on their complaint about the Commonwealth Government's Northern Territory Intervention Laws to the United Nations Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.
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In May 2010 George Newhouse assisted traditional owners of Muckaty Station to commence legal action against the Northern Land Council and the Commonwealth to overturn the nomination of their land as the site of Australia's first radioactive waste storage facility.
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In January 2011 George Newhouse successfully represented the Hermannsburg Bulldogs, an Indigenous Australian rules football team from, in the Northern Territory and had them reinstated into the Central Australian Football League competition after they were suspended from the competition without due process.
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In 2013 and 2014 George Newhouse acted for several Aboriginal Australian women who had their children removed by child protection agencies.
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In 2014 George Newhouse acted for the family of Andrea Pickett, an Aboriginal woman who was brutally murdered by her husband.
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George Newhouse has acted in many inquests for Aboriginal Australians who died in custody.
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George Newhouse has acted for Aboriginal Communities in WA and the Northern Territory, participated in many rallies and spoken at different events defending the rights of Indigenous Australians, refugees, ethnic minority groups and genocide survivors and denouncing all forms of racism and anti-Semitism and human rights abuse.
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George Newhouse has represented gay activist Gary Burns in two of his homosexual vilification cases.
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George Newhouse had an assault charge dismissed against a 64-year-old grandmother, Leentije McDonald, who was searched by NSW Police outside a pub in Maroubra in unusual circumstances.
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In 2015 George Newhouse won a defamation case against Newscorp blogger Andrew Bolt, who had alleged that George Newhouse had fraudulently asserted that a number of Sri Lankan people attempting to reach Australia by boat were asylum seekers.
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George Newhouse served as a Labor councillor on Waverley Council from 1995 to 2008.
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George Newhouse was active in the various local government committees, participating in the Finance, Ethics and Community Services Committees and chairing the Development Control Committee.
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George Newhouse was a founding member of the Waverley-Woollahra Bondi Junction Joint Planning Committee, and chaired the Waverley Council Bondi Junction Committee during a period of major upgrade including the $600 million Westfield redevelopment and the upgrade of Oxford Street.
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George Newhouse was elected to the executive of the NSW Local Government Association in 2004.
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George Newhouse was elected Deputy Mayor of Waverley in 2004 and became Mayor in September 2006.
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George Newhouse was endorsed in May 2007 as the Labor candidate for the federal electorate of Wentworth, held by the Liberal member, Malcolm Turnbull; at the time the Minister for Environment in the Howard Government.
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George Newhouse's decision led to criticism from the Australian Greens and other environmentalists.
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On polling day George Newhouse was assaulted by a prominent journalist Caroline Overington at their local polling booth.
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George Newhouse is a member of the Board of the Stolen Generations Testimony Foundation and was a Member of the advisory board of the Alex Buzo Company between 2007 and 2010.
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George Newhouse became a committee member of the Australian Climate Justice Program in November 2017.
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George Newhouse has been the company secretary for The McKell Institute, a progressive public policy institute dedicated to developing practical policy ideas and contributing to public debate, since its inception in 2011.
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In 2017 George Newhouse became a committee member of the Climate Justice Programme.