But Anthony, this is a bit of a shot in the dark, but what is memory?

I think it would just be very briefly important to touch on what constitutes, and I'll use quotation marks, a false memory, because it seems to be accepted that people think there's some research out there that shows somebody has had a spontaneous memory of child sexual abuse that never happened, and there's some sort of valid research that demonstrates that.

I would put to you that the research that underpins this idea of false memory is completely separate from how it gets applied in court.

So as an example, one of the most famous studies that looks at false memory has researchers get a series of events that has happened to somebody that their parents have provided as a child.

And this is the lost in the mall study.

And the researcher will say, your parent told me this happened to you.

Can you tell me what you remember about that? And it's a, it's a real thing that happened.

the bottom of all of this, Anthony, just finally, do you think it's because lawyers don't really trust the work you and other psychologists are doing?

Am I understanding that right?

Yeah.

And it basically created this reverse onus of admissibility where it was on the prosecutor to demonstrate that the evidence was reliable by following these guidelines for it to be admissible.

So the person's memory and experience was assumed inadmissible, distorted, conflated by default.

Right.

And it was then through these guidelines, it was then on the prosecution to prove that it was reliable by virtue of those guidelines.

Yeah.

I'm begging for Tasmania now.

And what are the concerns about hypnosis?

Some of the concerns with, um, hypnosis, as I spoke to you about how we say, "Okay, notice that, notice that," and it's quite scripted, right? So any EMDR therapist doing the standard protocol will say precisely that.

Hypnosis is quite different because suggestibility is actually part of the mechanism.

So part of it is suggesting things to help them see, think about things differently, to help them perhaps experience something different in relation to that.

So the mechanism for hypnosis is very different, but also the way it was historically used is, um, even as a psychologist, I think, quite unusual.

So the history of it was that there was a particular version of it, uh, forensic hypnosis, um, which wasn't, you know, someone using it for weight loss or to stop smoking.

There were, um, police officers who were using hypnosis with witnesses to try to get more information out of them about a perpetrator or to, to help them solve cases and, and, and address them.

Anthony Hurst, what do you want to see happen?