Law ‘ineffective’ in tackling white collar crime

Australia’s sentencing rules for corporate and financial fraud are “a knowledge wasteland”, one of the country’s top law academics has told a Senate inquiry into white-collar crime.

“There is absolutely no correlation between what knowledge tells us we can achieve through the sentencing of white-collar offenders and what we actually do,” Swinburne University of Technology professor Mirko Bagaric told a Senate public hearing in Melbourne.

“The law in this area has been built up on what feels right as opposed to what is actually right, and that is why it is utterly so ineffective.”