Category: Opinion
  • 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, 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.