Talk:Bank of Australia robbery

Title Amendment Possibly?

This page is titled, "Bank of Australia robbery" and then proceeds to describe a crime that is not a robbery, but a burglary. Please see the page on Bank Robbery for a clear delineation of the two. It might help if either a) this page was re-named to reflect the true nature of the crime being described, or b) the article included a clarification of the issue. Cottonshirtτ 09:29, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

I think that describing it as a robbery is probably more in keeping with the applicable criminal law of England at the time. Even in modern times this criminal act would commonly be described as a robbery by the media. Technically, under modern Australian law, this crime would be classified under ANZSOC Division 7 - Unlawful Entry with Intent/Burglary, Break and Enter - or Burglary for short, but this classification system was only decided upon in 1997. In 1828, this legal inclusion was much more uncertain as the applicable modern law wasn't even codified as draft legislation for the English Parliament until the 1870s by Sir James Fitzjames Stevens. New Zealand, for example, didn't consider codifying its criminal law until the 1880s. The Australian states all started codifying their state criminal laws about the 1880s or 1890s too. There is limited historical research about how the modern Australasian laws evolved but they all followed similar paths around the end of the 19th century. At the time of the bank break-in, English common law was probably still applicable which would suggest robbery was the more applicable crime than burglary, because the bank was not a dwelling house, which was the only situation the term burglary would have applied to under the common law of the time. Inclusion of businesses and non-dwelling buildings in the concept of burglary is a relatively recent concept. - Cameron Dewe (talk) 01:36, 20 March 2021 (UTC)