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Editorial

The Herald's View September 30, 2025 — 7.30pm

For Raya Meredith, attending Splendour in the Grass in 2018 was supposed to be exciting and fun. Instead, it was “harrowing and traumatising” as a result of being strip-searched by police before she had even walked through the gates.

It was a 30-minute “frightening” ordeal. The then-27-year-old, after being approached by an officer with a sniffer dog, was taken to a makeshift cubicle at the North Byron park venue, where a female police officer told her to pull down her top, take off her shorts and underwear, remove a tampon and bend over. This is when a male police officer walked in without knocking. No drugs were found.

She became the lead plaintiff in 2022 in a 3000-member class action in the

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