Among various possible options, a theme for the 1993 Menzies Lecture quite naturally emerged for an American whose special field is freedoms of expression' protected by the Constitution. A clear and easy choice was that of an American perspective on issues of free speech and press in light of the High Court judgments in Australian Capital Television Pty Ltd v Commonwealth of Australia (hereinafter ACTV) and Nationwide News Pty Ltd v Wills (hereinafter Nationwide News). The challenge of this assignment was daunting, since I realised that most who would hear and would later read these remarks would be far more conversant than I with these cases and their portent. Yet I took on the task with much enthusiasm, recognising an exceptional opportunity for international comparison and understanding.

The Administrative Appeals Tribunal (the AAT), which was established by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal Act 1975 (Cth) (the AAT Act), has now been functioning for more than 16 years. From very modest beginnings (see the 25 jurisdictions conferred pursuant to the Schedule to the original AAT Act), the Tribunal has had conferred upon it an increasingly wide range of review jurisdictions (presently in excess of 240), encompassing major areas of governmental decision-making.

The adequacy of the legal protection given to fundamental rights and freedoms is a topic of concern in both Australia and Britain, two jurisdictions which share a common legal heritage. Both have witnessed extensive debates in recent times about the desirability or otherwise of a Bill of Rights designed to protect human rights.

Health is one of the major areas of public expenditure in Australia. In 1991–1992, Australian governments spent $22.5 billion of the total health expenditure of $33.2 billion. A substantial part of Commonwealth expenditure subsidises patient access to private medical services through Medicare, which operates within the fee-for-service system with no cap on the number of services or on the total budget outlays for them.

[I]n order to begin to understand public law we must first try to make it strange.

The law of statutory interpretation is often wrongly thought of as a “quiet backwater”. The myth that it is a dry, formal subject containing simple rules persists despite high-level seminars devoted to it, law reform reports, sweeping statutory reforms, mammoth texts, sophisticated judicial descriptions, and, in the last decade, numerous scholarly articles and works emanating particularly from North America.

In Breavington v Godleman, Deane J stated: Basic to the jurisprudence of this country is the notion that the courts apply, as distinct from make, the law, that is to say, that the law operates contemporaneously to regulate lawfulness and consequences of conduct independently of judicial proceedings. In that context, it would be to substitute the bedlam of a Babel for an ordered system of law to recognise the right of each of the country's court systems, notwithstanding the place of this Court inall of them, to speak at the same time but in conflicting terms about the lawfulness, consequences or attributes of a particular act or thing in a particular place at a particular time.

Constitutional commentators have long been troubled by the question as to whether the notion of the rule of law operates, on the one hand, as a conduit for the expression of the supreme legislative authority of Parliament, or, on the other (at least to some degree) independently of, and thereby potentially in conflict with, parliamentary supremacy. As an alternative to both of these suggestions it might be held that according to the circumstances, the notion of the rule of law is capable of portraying both of these characteristics. Curiously, relatively little has been written on this specific issue in relation to Australia. The attention directed towards the vexed questions of the nature and extent of the federal division of powers in Australia (admittedly, themselves issues not unrelated to the present concern) has marginalised interest in the nature of legislative authority in Australia. “The one legal doctrine”, it has been recently proclaimed, “that Australian and other Commonwealth lawyers are never taught to question (or perhaps are taught never to question) is A V Dicey's theory of parliamentary omnipotence”.

The High Court has recently heard argument in the case of WCP Ltd v Gambotto. The case is on appeal from the New South Wales Court of Appeal. Although the facts of the case are relatively simple, the issues they raise are rather more complex. WCP Ltd is a company, the shares of which are almost entirely owned by Industrial Equity Ltd.