Category: Chris Nyst
  • Chris Nyst, Opinion, Sport

Satts Tells It All In Glory

Yesterday I joined South Sydney faithful at the old Redfern Town Hall in Sydney for the launch of Glory, Glory, the autobiographical account of the life and times of South Sydney rugby league legend ‘Gentleman’ John Sattler. MC’ed by John’s premiership-winning son Scott, and introduced by life-long South Sydney tragic Ray Martin, the event was a raging success, not least because of the engaging reminiscences of the great man himself.
  • Chris Nyst, Opinion, Politics

Cedric Hampson, One Of God’s Own Gentlemen. RIP

When I received a call last night to hear my old friend and mentor Cedric Hampson QC had passed away at his home over the weekend I was left with a deep sense of sadness. Cedric was not only a great intellect, and a very fine lawyer, but he really was one of God’s own gentlemen. A published novelist and lover of the arts, the former rugby player, Rhodes Scholar and President of the Queensland Bar Association was a man for all seasons, equally at home dissecting thorny legal issues before the Court of Appeal as he was sipping red wine and chatting idly about our common interest in movies, music and the arts. Over the years  Cedric and I worked closely together on many cases, including the successful appeal of former One Nation leader Pauline Hanson, and he was  always an inspiration. He was rightly recognised as without peer in the Queensland legal profession for generations. Above all he was just a lovely man – always courteous, avuncular and generous of spirit - and he will be sorely missed.
  • Chris Nyst, Criminal Law, Human Rights, Opinion

Need For Restraint

Earlier this week I was sitting in the public gallery of a Magistrates Court on the Sunshine Coast waiting for my client's matter to be called before the magistrate, when a downcast defendant was led into the dock with both hands locked together in a pair of impressive-looking wrist restraints. The police prosecutor proceeded to launch into a dissertation on the defendant's misdemeanours, when the Magistrate abruptly interrupted.
  • Chris Nyst, Commercial Law, Opinion

Animal Rights, Or Just Plain Monkey Business?

As a novelist and film-maker, and advisor to a singer-songwriter son heavily involved in the music industry here in Australia as well as internationally, copyright is a subject near and dear to my heart. I’ve learned from bitter experience that the golden rule for any creative is ‘hold on to copyright as long as you can’. When I wrote my first film script I found the first thing most producers wanted me to do was assign them copyright in the script, and managers and music labels signing up aspiring rock stars are always looking to slip into their agreements clauses giving them a healthy piece of any copyright action that’s on offer. That’s because when it comes to the business of the arts, copyright means control.
  • Chris Nyst, Hollywood, Opinion

Back To The Future – Southport Named The ‘New’ CBD

It's great to see Southport officially recognised by the State Government as the Gold Coast's ‘new’ CBD. What a great story. It's got everything but Marty McFly. In Robert Zemeckis’s classic 1985 sci-fi comedy Back to the Future teenager Marty McFly (Michael J Fox) is sent back in time in a DeLorean sports car time-machine to re-visit his sleepy mid-west home town in 1955. In the early 1980s when I opened a law firm with my old mate Johnny Witheriff, I wasn’t quite driving a DeLorean, but my 1963 Wolsley 6 was almost as plush, and back then in the future Southport was already the ‘big smoke’ of the Gold Coast.
  • Chris Nyst, Family Law, Technology

Stay Off Social Media And Out Of The Family Court?

Over the past several years anecdotal experience in the our family law practice has had some at Nyst Legal raising their eyebrows about the number of more mature couples lining up for the divorce, often after striking up new relationships over the Internet. Now it's official, with statistics showing that there is a growing in divorces involving couples in the over-55 age bracket. Australian Bureau of Statistics figures now show that the divorce rate is up 2% since 2011, with 49,917 Australian’s splitting in 2012, and experts are laying the cause partly at the feet of the explosion in social networking sites. Sounds like some people may be fudging their online profiles way too much.
  • Chris Nyst, Criminal Law, Opinion, Sport

Brother For Brother

We choose our friends. We don’t choose our family. But family is family, for better or for worse. Mostly we love them, at times they drive us to distraction. They embarrass us, and we embarrass them. But as life pitches up its cruel and crazy curveballs, family is a constant.
  • Chris Nyst, Criminal Law, Opinion

Hot Mugshot Guy – Are We Seriously Losing It?

The story that went viral last week about the so-called "hot mugshot guy" Jeremy Meeks raises some very interesting social issues in this new world of all-pervasive media. With television news reports following real-life crimes and court cases in a blow-by-blow, up-close-and-personal style, reality television crews following around cops and customs officers filming them in action, increasingly realistic and graphic CSI-type T.V. shows giving us a voyeur’s view into real-life crime (or is it ?), and interactive computer games like Grand Theft Auto allowing our kids a hands-on, albeit computer generated, experience in committing crime, the question has to be asked – are we seriously losing touch with reality? Society’s apparently increasing fascination with crime and criminals has many wondering whether at least some amongst us may be finding it difficult to distinguish between reality and entertainment.
  • Chris Nyst, Opinion, Politics

Is The Chief Justice Debate About Carmody?

I read with great interest the newspaper report on comments made by Court of Appeal Justice John Muir in his recent address to the North Queensland branch of the Bar Association’s biannual Court of Appeal dinner in Townsville.