The nature of the Australian Consitution is usually described as eiher monarchic and parliamentary, or republican and federal. However, more than succinct expressions of the key political concepts behind the Australian Constitution, the two metaphors are the products of particular forms of analysis. Essentially, the terms parliamentary or consitutional monarchy and federal republic are the products of either revisionist or institutional interpretations of the Australian Constitution. The institutional interpretation focuses on tie practical function of the Constitution's federal and parliamentary institutions, and the origins of these devices within the British and American Constitutions. For example, as the Australian Constitution embraces the institutions of both Anerican federalism and British parliamentary government, institutionalists interpret its nature by relating the strucure and operation of Australia's federal and parliamentary institutions to the function of sinilar devices within the British and American Constitutions.

A court's approach to non-parties, such as the amicus curiae and intervener, reflects its perception of its own larger role. The Supreme Courts of Canada and the United States, as well as the Constitutional Court of South Africa, have welcomed submissions from public interest organisations and others and have drafted Rules of Court to allow their participation in cases raising important issues of public policy. The South African Court has even solicited submissions from strangers to the litigation, such as academics, in order to broaden its perspective on a case arid on the consequences of any decision it might reach. The approach of these courts shows how each has embraced the roles of law-maker arid interpreter of an ambiguous constitution.

The High Court of Australia, on the other hand, frequently denies the amicus curiae and intervener any meaningful function. They are riot even mentioned in the Rules of Court. While it is true that the total number of interventions in the Court has increased over the last decade, the door has often been closed.

In a recent article Andrew Lokan has suggested that the courts are faced with political choices as they deal with native title. The purpose of this paper is to consider the history of the recognition of Aboriginal customary rights to land in Australia, assess the extent to which policy and political issues have thus far been relevant in those developments and then to consider the extent to which such policy and political issues may be relevant in the future. Possible limitations upon the policies that might be considered by the courts are discussed. The discussion also affords an opportunity to look back over the development of the law of native title and to review how and why we have come to where we now are.

In numerous histories of Aboriginal peoples in Tasmania written up to the 1970s, the image of Truganini, in western clothes seeing out her days, is the visible presence of extinction. “Her last years were comfortable, it seems, but there was a shadow over them—her fear of the body-snatchers and mutilation after death... ‘Don't let them cut me up’ she begged the doctor as she lay dying. 'Bury me behind the mountains.' The histories end with romantic philosophical musings over the inevitable demise of Tasmanian Aborigines. “The Tasmanians were hurried and harried from the face of this earth by the poison of European contact and the sword of destruction. Unable to merge with the European colonists, unable to withstand them, they perished.” The histories present a natural and irrefutable closure. There are no Tasmanian Aborigines.

The advent of native title law has brought with it a new interrogation of the history of Aboriginal people in Australia. The claims process has produced new ethnographic, anthropological and historical interest in indigenous history and culture.

The current arrangements for taxation of superannuation in Australia are directed to ensuring that individuals make more adequate provision for their retirement than has occurred in the past. The use of tax concessions to do this obviously involves a cost to the public revenue. The use of tax concessions in relation to superannuation is both inefficient, because it provides concessions to those who would make provision for their retirement even without the concessions, and inequitable, because it provides the greatest concessions to those at the upper end of the income scale. Taxpayers who are unlikely to access the concessions fully are those who do not follow the traditional work pattern of a substantial unbroken period of employment. The aim of this article is to demonstrate that, at the turn of the century, many women have work patterns that differ from the traditional model and that the current arrangements for superannuation, which form a major component of the government's retirement incomes policy, are inequitable and should be changed.

Corporations are undergoing a subtle transformation. Usually regarded as investment vehicles for shareholders, corporations are now assuming an additional identity–as entities which share responsibility for upholding human rights. This new identity does not sit comfortably with conventional wisdom on corporate governance. Traditional corporate governance theory, based on nineteenth century notions of trust, posits that ‘the company’ is a legal entity embodying the members from time to time. Directors, as trustees of corporate assets, owe duties to foster the interests of the shareholders by maximising their investments. Under this view, directors do not owe wider obligations to society.

This traditional understanding, however, is beginning to yield to more recent legal and social pressures. Legal developments in regulatory practice, in combination with an upsurge in social movement activism, is now forcing corporations to accept that they are more than mere economic entities. They are also private ‘governments’–social and political entities with the ability to exercise general powers over themselves and, more importantly, over others.

In Egan v Willis, the High Court declared that the New South Wales Legislative Council had a common law power to call for state papers from Ministers in the House. The case's greatest constitutional significance, however, may be its effect on the relationship between the Parliament and the Court. By making declarations about the relationship between a Minister and the House, the Court appears to have taken on a new role of arbitrating internal parliamentary proceedings independent of any substantive issue outside the House. While such intervention may help secure the rule of law within the legislature, it has traditionally been held that the internal proceedings of the legislature should be subject to the control of the people's elected representatives alone. The need for independence between the legislative, judicial and executive arms of government and their effective operation has, within the British and American constitutional traditions, led to the identification of certain issues as being outside the jurisdiction of the courts or otherwise not justiciable.

Australian freedom of information (FOI) specialists, on first encounter with New Zealand's Official Information Act 1982, tend to scratch their heads about this quaint and quixotic variant of access legislation. Viewed from a trans-Tasman perspective, the Official Information Act appears riddled with extremely flexible provisions which would offer hard-bitten bureaucrats easy escape routes to avoid providing requested information. An initial glance at the history of the Official Information Act merely confirms this observation. When it was launched, the Official Information Act was seen by many New Zealanders as a poor compromise between an Official Secrets Act and freedom of information legislation. Indeed, Sir Robert Muldoon referred to it as a “nine day wonder”. The final passage of the Australian FOT Act was accompanied by an initial belief in the creation of a nascent regime of openness, whereas the introduction of the Official Information Act was depicted by the Public Service Association as “Not a freedom of information law...nor a secrecy law...but an uneasy compromise between the two”.