Rowe v Davidson

The case of *Rowe v Davidson* concerned an appeal to the High Court of Australia from a decision of the Supreme Court of Victoria. The appellant, Nicholas Daniel Rowe, a police constable, had laid an information against the respondent, Jean Davidson, alleging she sold a ticket in a lottery contrary to section 89(f) of the *Police Offences Act 1928* (Vic.). The charge arose from the sale of a document by the respondent to a police constable, which the constable believed gave him a chance to win a motor car to be raffled at a bazaar.

The legal issues before the court were whether the document sold by the respondent constituted a "ticket in a lottery" within the meaning of the Act, and whether the transaction fell within the exception provided for raffles conducted at bazaars for charitable purposes. Specifically, the court had to determine if the document was a ticket in a lottery, if the raffle itself qualified for the charitable bazaar exception under section 88(3)(c), and the evidentiary weight of the purchaser's belief under section 92(1).

The court reasoned that the document in question was not a ticket in a lottery but rather an authorisation for a trust to purchase a ticket on behalf of the signatory. Crucially, evidence established that the promoters of the raffle (the Mildura Hospital Committee) and the entity selling the authorisations (the Mildura Citizens' Charity Trust) were entirely separate, and the authorisations did not confer any direct right or interest in the raffle. The court found that the transaction did not constitute a single scheme for a lottery, and the document itself did not grant a chance to win. Furthermore, section 92(1) of the Act, which creates a presumption based on the purchaser's belief, was held to provide only a rebuttable presumption of fact, not conclusive proof.

The High Court affirmed the decision of the Supreme Court of Victoria, which had discharged an order nisi to review the police magistrate's dismissal of the information. Consequently, the appeal was dismissed, and the respondent was found not to have infringed section 89(f) of the *Police Offences Act 1928* (Vic.) as the document sold was not a ticket in a lottery.