In hearings in Melbourne and Sydney today, the High Court agreed to hear six new cases. The six cases are appeals from the following judgments:

• Barbaro v The Queen; Zirilli v The Queen [2012] VSCA 288, where the Victorian Court of Appeal rejected a sentencing appeal by two drug traffickers who were involved in the importation of over 15 million ecstasy tablets hidden inside tins of tomatoes. The defendants’ main complaint was that the sentencing judge, King J, refused to take account of submissions on sentencing range by the prosecutor and ended up imposing sentences that were higher than the range the prosecutor would have proposed. Applying a landmark ruling by the same Court from 2008, which held that the prosecutor should make such submissions if the sentencing judge asks for them, the Court of Appeal ruled that Justice King was not obliged to receive such submissions and that the sentences her Honour issued were not manifestly excessive. (The Court did not grant special leave in this case, but rather referred it to a bench of five or seven judges. In practice, it will be argued as an appeal.)

• Hills Industries Ltd v Australian Financial Services and Leasing Pty Ltd; Australian Financial Services and Leasing Pty Ltd v Bosch Security Systems Pty Ltd [2012] NSWCA 380, where the NSW Court of Appeal held that a company that had paid money to a fraudster for non-existent goods could not recover the money. Two innocent companies had received the money from the fraudster to settle debts he owed them. Although the first company could make out a restitutionary action on the basis of mistake of fact, the Court held that it was unjust to order the other two companies to return the money to the first company, because they had changed their position in good faith on the basis of the receipt and had forgone opportunities to pursue the fraud’s debts.

• James v The Queen [2013] VSCA 55, where the Victorian Court of Appeal rejected a man’s appeal against his conviction for intentionally causing serious injury to a man in the carpark of Melbourne’s Highpoint Shopping Centre, after a bystander testified that he deliberately drove his car into the victim. The Court of Appeal split on whether less incriminating accounts initially given to the police by both the victim and the defendant meant that a lesser charge of intentionally causing injury should have been left to the jury and that the jury should not have been invited to treat the defendant’s story as evidence of his consciousness of guilt.

• Kline v Official Secretary to the Governor-General [2012] FCAFC 184, where the Federal Court of Australia rejected a nurse’s Freedom of Information application seeking documents relating to her unsuccessful nomination of an unnamed person for an Order of Australia in 2007 and 2009. The Full Court held that the documents fell within an exemption in s 6A of the Freedom of Information Act 1982 (Cth) for ‘a document of the Official Secretary of the Governor-General’ and outside of a proviso for ‘matters of an administrative nature’.

• Li v Chief of Army [2013] FCAFC 20, where the Federal Court of Appeal rejected an appeal by a defence lawyer in the Australian Defence Force against a conviction for the disciplinary offence of ‘creat[ing] a disturbance’ during a heated exchange with a defence financial claims officer in the latter’s office. The Court unanimously held that such a confrontation could amount to an offence, even when (as the defendant claimed) it was a response to an alleged racial slur. However, only a narrow majority accepted that the Judge Advocate at the defendant’s Court Martial was correct in stating that the offence does not require proof that the accused ‘intended to create a disturbance’.

• TPG Internet Pty Ltd v Australian Competition and Consumer Commission [2012] FCAFC 190, where the Federal Court of Australia last year partially allowed an appeal from a trial court ruling that advertisements by an internet service provider were misleading and deceptive. Stills of the advertisements are set out as annexures to the Full Court’s judgment. In a further decision earlier this year, the Full Court followed up by quashing the lower court’s order for corrective advertising and replaced the original penalty of $2 million with a penalty of just $50,000.