NSW Police Tell Appeal Court Force Is Permissible to Complete Strip-Searches
On 4 June 2026, lawyers for NSW Police returned to the state's Court of Appeal to argue that officers may use force to reposition a person's body parts during a strip-search — the position the force has staked out as it contests a comprehensive class action it lost in 2025. The case is one of the most significant tests of police-search powers in Australia this decade, and the state's argument is being closely watched by civil liberties groups, policing advocates and the festival industry in equal measure.
The class action stems from the search of Raya Meredith at a music festival. In 2025, a NSW court found that search unlawful and unjustified — the first time a court had ruled comprehensively on strip-search practices at large public events in the state. NSW Police have appealed that decision, and in doing so have asked the appeal court to accept that officers retain an implied power to complete a strip-search by physically adjusting a complainant's body, including intimate parts, when a subject does not comply voluntarily.
What the 2025 judgment said
The 2025 ruling ran to several hundred pages. It examined not only the individual circumstances of the search of Meredith but the broader pattern of strip-searching at NSW music festivals — a pattern the court found was at odds with the Law Enforcement (Powers and Responsibilities) Act, the statute that governs police search powers in the state. The judgment found that NSW Police had been conducting strip-searches on bases the statute did not authorise, particularly in cases involving young people and small-quantity drug finds.
A central finding concerned the use of force during searches. The court found that the statute's authorisation to conduct a strip-search does not, on its proper construction, carry with it a general power to physically manipulate a person's body to complete the search. Strip-searches of minors in NSW require either informed consent or authorisation from a senior officer, and the court found the search of Meredith met neither threshold in a way that justified the force used.
The judgment also scrutinised the conditions under which festival searches were being carried out. Internal NSW Police documents disclosed during the proceedings revealed that officers had been directed to conduct strip-searches on the basis of small drug finds on associates — a practice the court described as exceeding statutory authority. The 2025 ruling was, in effect, a finding that the routine practice had drifted outside the law. That finding is what the state is now asking the appeal court to overturn or narrow.
The state's argument in 2026
In oral submissions this week, counsel for NSW Police advanced a different reading of the statute. The state's position is that where an officer is lawfully conducting a strip-search, and where a person is non-compliant, the officer may use reasonable force to reposition body parts — including, where necessary, intimate parts of the body — to complete the search. The implied power, the state argues, is necessary to give the statutory authorisation practical effect.
The argument has drawn immediate pushback from counsel for the respondents, who characterise it as a back-door attempt to read the word "consent" out of the statute. Strip-searches of children and young people in NSW require consent or senior officer authorisation precisely because of the coercive character of the search, the respondents argue; a power to physically complete the search against a person's will collapses that protective distinction.
The appeal is being heard by a full bench. The court is expected to reserve, with a decision likely to take several months. The state's framing — practical necessity — and the respondents' framing — statutory construction — will be tested against the text of the Law Enforcement (Powers and Responsibilities) Act and against the long line of authority on what counts as a reasonable exercise of police power.
The pattern at festivals
The Meredith case did not emerge from nowhere. NSW has, for the better part of a decade, recorded strip-search rates at major music festivals that exceed comparable Australian jurisdictions. The state's festival strip-search figures, as reported in public hearings and in oversight body reports, have outpaced those in Victoria and Queensland, prompting recurring questions from parliamentarians, civil liberties advocates and the Law Enforcement Conduct Commission — the state's independent civilian oversight body.
The LECC has, in successive reports, raised concerns about the consistency and proportionality of strip-searches at large public events. It has documented cases in which teenagers were searched in public view, in some cases with insufficient privacy screening, and in which small drug finds triggered strip-searches that the LECC considered disproportionate. The Commission has recommended legislative amendment to clarify the threshold at which a strip-search may be conducted on a minor and to require more rigorous recording of consent.
The state government's response to those recommendations has been incremental. Modest reforms to consent procedures have been introduced in recent years, but the broader questions raised by the LECC and now by the class action remain live. The appeal will be heard against that backdrop — a backdrop in which the routine practice of strip-searching at festivals has come under sustained public scrutiny, and in which the legal limits of that practice are being tested in court.
The stakes
For NSW Police, the appeal is about preserving operational latitude. A loss would force the force to retrain officers, to revise its standing operating procedures for searches at large public events, and to limit the conditions under which physical force may be used to complete a strip-search. The force has acknowledged in internal communications, disclosed during the proceedings, that a loss in the appeal would have cascading operational implications.
For the respondents, a win in the appeal would solidify the 2025 findings and keep open the compensation pathways established by the class action. It would, in addition, send a clear signal to NSW Police that the routine use of force to complete strip-searches exceeds the scope of the statute — a signal with implications well beyond the festival context.
For festival-goers and the wider public, the case has become a referendum on how much physical coercion the law tolerates in searches conducted on suspicion of minor drug possession. NSW remains the only Australian state in which strip-search rates at festivals have triggered a successful systemic class action. The court's eventual ruling will determine whether that distinction narrows or widens. Either outcome will shape the conditions under which hundreds of thousands of people are searched each summer.
What remains uncertain
Several factual matters remain contested. The exact number of class members eligible for compensation has not been publicly disclosed; the respondents have indicated the figure runs into the hundreds, but the precise number is the subject of ongoing assessment. The state's appeal has not yet indicated whether it will challenge individual findings of fact or limit itself to questions of law. And the appeal court's eventual ruling will be a statutory-construction exercise, not a factual one — meaning the dispute over what the law permits may not resolve the underlying question of what was actually done.
Desk note
Monexus is tracking this appeal as a test case for police-search powers in Australia. Sourcing for this piece is limited to the Guardian Australia asset referenced above and to stable reference pages; the appeal's full transcript and the 2025 judgment are not yet publicly linked at the time of writing.
Wire provenance
This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_South_Wales_Police_Force
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_Enforcement_Conduct_Commission
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splendour_in_the_Grass