 I'd like to welcome to the stage Justine Poon from the A New College of Law and the title of Justine's three minute presentation tonight is How a Body Becomes a Boat. How do you turn a body into a boat and then make it disappear? The answer is with law. Law can be thought of as a system of magic tricks that transforms things from the real world into their legal categories. So let's say you park your car quickly to grab a takeaway coffee. But when you come back, there's a parking fine on your windscreen. Whether you know it or not, you have just been transformed by law into a hatchback in the loading zone. Once you've been transformed, the legal system then processes you according to that category. In the same way, my PhD looks at how law defines people seeking asylum as unauthorized maritime arrivals. The language seems harmless, but the result is that a person who would have once come under the international and domestic law protection of refugee law is now defined solely by the problem of the presence of boats within the border. The state is then authorized to move these boats to offshore detention centres. The law doesn't ask any questions about why those people were on the boats, and it does not take responsibility for their safety. This legal category strips all reasons and humanity away from the law. Now let's think again about that parking fine of yours. If some construction work had obstructed the sign or if you had parked there because of a medical emergency, you can challenge that fine in court. When you're successful, you'll be released from that legal category. By contrast, for people who are defined as unauthorized boats, the legal category deprives them of their freedom, is indefinite and cannot be challenged under Australian law. My research seeks to understand how this legal magic of turning bodies into boats can seriously challenge our ideas about the legal system and the rule of law. Now this legal magic is probably seeming like a rather dark magic. But the idea that bodies could be boats is just that, an idea. And we as a society have a choice as to what that idea could be instead. Do we, after all, want a legal system that can transform people in ways that seriously impact on their well-being without giving them the opportunity to speak or to challenge that transformation? The outcome of my research is that we all have a stake in building the laws that can recognize the reality and complexity of human beings without transforming them into a problem for some place else. Now that would be truly magical.