One-Punch Drunk: White Masculinities as a Property Right in New South Wales’ Assault Causing Death Law Reforms

Abstract

Abstract In the mid-2010s, New South Wales (NSW) introduced statutory reforms responding to prominent fatal one-punch assaults in public and publican spaces – introducing mandatory sentences for a new class of offenses, and summary offenses – that to date appear to have targeted predominately young minority men. This paper argues that the reforms, inspired in NSW and other Australian states by one-punch assaults by intoxicated minority men against affluent young white men, are expressions of an proprietary right to larrikinism (a colonial-era cultural tradition of drunken, irreverent masculinity) in criminal law, rather than gestures to prevent or punish public violence at large. It further posits that the reforms are an expression of Australian criminal laws’ tendency to protect young white men and their interests, through benevolently safeguarding their exclusive right to mutual social violence and public recreational space and punishing others who use that violence and that space. It concludes that the reforms create white patriarchal rights to public space and the exclusive use of violence within it.