bonus EPISODE ONE
Bureaucratic violene today: an interview with josh bornstein
In this bonus episode, employment and human rights lawyer Josh Bornstein talks with Katherine Biber about the family history that shaped his career. Bornstein’s grandparents left Poland in 1933 hoping to escape, finally securing passage to Melbourne in 1938, only for his grandmother to be hospitalised under a Nazi doctor and his grandfather interrogated by German police during a stopover before they could continue the journey. Growing up in a politically engaged household — his mother a union official, his father a journalist and, for a time, a politician — Bornstein built a career defending workers and refugees against far more powerful opponents, including the Transport Workers Union’s case against Qantas, which he took to a seven nil victory in the High Court and more than $200 million in combined compensation and penalties.
The conversation also turns to the language used to describe how governments treat refugees. Bornstein pushes back on the term “bureaucratic violence,” arguing that responsibility lies with political decisions rather than the public service, drawing on his experience acting for Shayan Badraie, the young Iranian refugee whom then immigration minister Philip Ruddock refused to refer to as anything other than “it.” He also reflects on the legacy of the Tampa election, the use of refugee policy as a political weapon since, and his recent writing on international law and Israel’s obligations under the ICJ’s provisional measures order in the genocide case.
Featured in this Bonus Episode
Josh Bornstein
Josh Bornstein is the Director of Corporate Regulation at The Australia Institute. Prior to joining the Australia Institute, Josh was an award-winning lawyer and the national practise leader of the employment and industrial relations team at Maurice Blackburn for 29 years.
He is an honorary adjunct associate professor at UTS and a member of the Victorian Racing Tribunal. He is also a director of the Australian Society of Authors. His book, ‘Working for the Brand: how corporations are destroying free speech’ was published by Scribe in 2024.
Josh’s grandparents fled Poland, arriving in Australia in 1938.
Katherine Biber
Katherine Biber is a legal scholar, historian and criminologist and Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Technology Sydney. Her latest book, The Last Outlaws: The crimes of Jimmy & Joe Governor and the birth of modern Australia, was published in 2025 by Scribner (Simon & Schuster), and was preceded by an award-winning podcast trilogy also titled The Last Outlaws, made in collaboration with descendants of Jimmy Governor. Katherine has been collaborating historian on four History Lab podcast productions.
Katherine teaches and researches the laws of evidence, particularly photographic evidence, documents, and histories of evidence. She is author of the books In Crime’s Archive: The cultural afterlife of evidence (2019) and Captive Images: Race, crime, photography (2007), and co-editor of the book Law’s Documents (2022) and Evidence and the Archive (2017), The Lindy Chamberlain Case (2009) and Playing the Man (1999). Until recently, Katherine was co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Crime, Media, Culture.
Episode credits
This special History Lab series was made on Gadigal land, in Sydney. It was edited and mixed by BLAH.
Emergency Exit was supported by funding from the Australian Research Council.
History Lab is an Impact Studios podcast. Its executive producer is Sarah Gilbert.