In this article I will discuss two questions concerning “originalism” in Australian constitutional law. The questions are, first, the extent to which the contemporary meanings of constitutional provisions, express or implied, are the same as their original meanings in 1900, when the Constitution was created; and secondly, the extent to which those original meanings are determined by the intentions of the people responsible for creating it (whom I will call “the founders”). These two questions are distinct. Almost all literary critics would agree that the language in Shakespeare's plays should be understood in its original sixteenth century sense, but many would deny that any other evidence of Shakespeare's intentions is relevant in interpreting it. Similarly, a literalist, who believes that the meaning of the Constitution is exhausted by the meanings of its words, could hold that their original literal meanings are critical, but reject the relevance of any other evidence of the founders' intentions.

The Australian National University, the Sir Robert Menzies Memorial Trust and the University of Virginia Law School have established an annual Menzies Lecture Series. The Lectures are held in honour of Sir Robert Menzies and mark his contribution to the law and public life. The Lectures are given in alternate years at the Law Schools of the University of Virginia and the Australian National University. The Lectures will be published in the “Federal Law Review”. The first Menzies Lecturer was The Honourable Sir Anthony Mason of the High Court of Australia who visited the University of Virginia in October 1985. The following article is based on Sir Anthony’s lecture.

In Australia there are nine bodies of legislation; Commonwealth, State and Territorial. The laws within each of these systems may differ from each other in significant ways. Such differences, especially when occurring in areas of “technical law”, may cause considerable inconvenience to Australians and to their legal advisers. In social and economic terms, for many purposes Australia is a single nation, and is not divided by State boundaries. Enactment of uniform laws in each part of Australia could lead to much greater convenience for businesses, individual citizens and lawyers.

This article examines some of the ways in which international organisations and bodies within other federal nations have been working towards the unification and harmonisation of rules of law, in selected areas. From this examination, some parallels are drawn with the situation in Australia. The article also makes some suggestions for greater uniformity of laws in Australia against the political background which may explain why law in Australia has come to be diverse.

Australia is following in the footsteps of the UK and US and embracing the discourse and regulatory technologies associated with modern slavery regulation. This paper offers a critical perspective on this development. It begins with a brief account of the concept's rise to prominence, and discusses the political economy in which it is embedded. It then explores some of the advantages, as well as the pitfalls, associated with the frame, and its associated regulatory approaches, techniques and discourse. The authors raise three broad sets of concerns. The first goes to the danger of exclusively focusing on criminal justice responses to penalise and deter those who practice modern slavery while neglecting other approaches that may help address the causes of the phenomenon. The second set of concerns goes to the tendency to exaggerate the transformative potential of one of the dominant regulatory responses in this area: the mandatory corporate supply chain reporting provision. The third set of concerns relate to the implications of addressing issues of worker exploitation and mistreatment through a modern slavery and human trafficking approach rather than through other well established and newer regulatory means. To support the third argument, the authors compare the modern slavery approach with two alternate approaches: labour regulation and human rights due diligence. The authors emphasise the need for vigilance to ensure that the embracement of a modern slavery frame does not shift attention (and resources) away from more thorough and effective means of securing greater corporate accountability for labour standards in supply chains.

This article focuses on the Australian implementation of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) Recommendations, so-called ‘soft law’ instruments, which represent the international standards in Counter Terrorist Financing (CTF) but which force legislators to conform. The article will fill the gaps existing in the literature today by focusing on the origins and motives of broad CTF legislation in Australia, then detailing each of the FATF's CTF Recommendations and the ways in which they are implemented in Australia. This approach differs significantly from other literature in the field, which deals solely with Australian implementation of one of the FATF's components. The current paper's examination will reveal the CTF regime in Australia, a decade after the FATF's first CTF Mutual Evaluation Report on Australia, and its decisive influence.

The phrase ‘Australian exceptionalism’ is most often used these days in relation to Australia's stand with the United States in the war against terror and the Australian government's attitude to international human rights law. Australia is exceptional also in being now the only English-speaking democracy without a judicially enforceable bill of rights at the federal level. Although not unrelated, here I want to explore whether the part of Australian public law that deals with judicial review of administrative action is also ‘exceptional’. I will identify the features that are commonly said to set Australia apart from other common law jurisdictions and justify Australia taking a different path in the elaboration of the principles of judicial review of administrative action.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing mandated health protections saw courts turn to communications technology as a means to be able to continue to function. However, courts are unique institutions that exercise judicial power in accordance with the rule of law. Even in a pandemic, courts need to function in a manner consistent with their institutional role and their essential characteristics. This article uses the unique circumstances brought about by the pandemic to consider how courts can embrace technology but maintain the core or essential requirements of a court. This article identifies three essential features of courts—open justice, procedural fairness and impartiality—and examines how this recent adoption of technology has maintained or challenged those essential features. This examination allows for an assessment of how the courts operated during the pandemic and also provides guidance for making design decisions about a technology-enabled future court.

The High Court . . . is properly termed the “keystone of the federal arch”.

— Alfred Deakin

take it as an incontrovertible axiom that responsible government is to be the keystone of this federal arch.

— Isaac Isaacs

Our argument in this paper is that the evidentiary practices and procedures that have been developed by the Australian Refugee Review Tribunal are operating at a routinely low standard. Such practices contribute to decisions that are manifestly unfair and potentially wrong in law. A recent working paper from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees ('the UNHCR') notes that evidentiary questions have been 'largely ignored in the academic literature.' Our conclusions are drawn from our detailed study of more than 300 refugee tribunal decisions made in Canada and Australia in response to asylum claims brought by lesbians and gay men. Our overall frame of inquiry in this study considers how the respective tribunals grapple with the issue of identity, the complex cluster of dilemmas around the public/private divide, the inability of many decision-makers to imagine the 'other' who stands before them in these claims, and the way this area of law encodes and reflects homophobic stereotyping.

Most commentators agree that, if Australia is to adopt a charter of rights, such a charter should so far as possible involve a ‘minimalist’ form of constitutional change. It should both be enacted by ordinary statute and seek to preserve broad scope for the Commonwealth Parliament, in appropriate cases, to override the interpretation of non-Constitutional rights by the High Court. When it comes to questions of form and enforceability, the thinking is that it should be modelled on either the Human Rights Act 1998 (UK) c 42 ('UK HRA’), and the largely equivalent state statutory charters in the ACT and Victoria, or on the Canadian Bill of Rights, SC 1960, c 44 ('CBOR’).

Not only would a statutory charter of this kind be easier to adopt than a more entrenched model of charter, such as a charter modelled on the US Bill of Rights, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms 1982 (the second and later of Canada's two operative human rights charters) ('Canadian Charter’), or Constitution of the Republic of South Africa 1996.

Brian Galligan says that I have misread or misunderstood the whole thrust of his argument. I suggest that the shoe is on the other foot. Readers will have to decide who has misunderstood whom.

I welcome the opportunity to respond to Jeffrey Goldsworthy’s article, “Realism about the High Court”, in which he criticises aspects of my account of the High Court’s political role in interpreting the Australian Constitution. My book, Politics of the High Court, sets out the functions that the Founders intended the Court to play — interpreting the Constitution and adjudicating high level disputes involving governments — and examines, within a historical context, how the Court has actually carried out those functions in major decisions and lines of interpretation of key sections of the Constitution. As I pointed out in the book, this is the stuff of ‘high’ politics: authoritatively determining the meaning of the Constitution which is the basic instrument of government; and in particular disputes deciding whether to overrule democratically elected governments.

Between 1990 and 1993, the Australian High Court handed down an amazing series of judgments. Twelve cases were involved. Six of them were primarily concerned with curbing the power of tile executive or modifying the rule of law doctrine. The remaining six focused on the protection of the rights of individuals. It is suggested that these decisions, four of which were unanimous and only two of which had as many as three Justices in dissent, reveal a major, and possibly a long-term, shift in the orientation of the Court. Using its own and British jurisprudence as a springboard, the Court is rejuvenating the traditional doctrine of the rule of law by applying it not only to rights against the state — the traditional view of civil and political rights — but also to claims upon the state, which some theorists consider are non-rights and only programmatic in their nature. It has begun to extend the concept of the rule of law into the area of substantive, as distinct from formal, equality. Finally, it has elevated certain rights to the status of a new and potent “common law of the Constitution”.

Ever since Bentham attempted to “pluck the mask of Mystery from the face ofjurisprudence”, courts have been accused of legitimating their decisions by hiding their real grounds, which are necessarily subjective and partisan, behind a smokescreen of artificial and esoteric ratiocination. Such iconoclasm has, in our century, been a staple of American realism, Marxism and more recently the critical legal studies ‘movement’, all of which have inevitably influenced Australian legal theory.

It has sometimes been argued that in constitutional cases the High Court has used ‘legalism’ to confer on essentially political decisions a speciously apolitical appearance. This argument is made most carefully and thoroughly by Brian Galligan, a political scientist, in his recent study of the High Court. His argument deserves to be carefully assessed, especially if he is right to predict that a more ‘realistic’ account of judging is destined to supplant ‘legalism’ in academic and legal circles, and in the public mind.

In a recent issue of the Australian Law Journal Enid Campbell argued that both the length of High Court judgments and the number of multiple separate High Court judgments has increased and that this is counterproductive. This view echoes similar concerns expressed by some judges and others in the profession. This argument is based on several assumptions about the High Court that are widely held among lawyers, but which have not been subject to any detailed empirical research. Those assumptions are:

1. (a) High Court judgments have become significantly longer in recent times.

2. (b) There is an increase in the number of concurring judgments on the High Court.

3. (c) There is an increase in the number of dissenting judgments on the High Court.

Constitutional theory and doctrine are important to our understanding and experience of government. No description of Australian government is complete without reference to representative democracy, responsible government, separation of powers and the rule of law. Those and other theories also have substantial practical impact. Courts refer to them in developing legal principle and deciding cases. Legislators are reminded of them in framing laws. They structure transactions between the different institutions of government. The community is also influenced by them in evaluating the performance of the institutions of government.

The most important doctrine in analysing government legal accountability is the separation of powers. The essence of the doctrine is that parliament makes law, the executive administers it and the judiciary – in the context of adjudicating individual disputes – decides whether the law has been correctly construed and applied. This three-way division of functions avoids the undue concentration of power in any one branch of government, enables each branch to counterbalance the others, and ensures that legal disputes about government power are conclusively resolved by an independent judiciary.

Literature on the necessity for reform of Australia‘s federal division of government continues to blossom, reflecting the assessment of a leading expert in the area that the system is now at a ‘cross-road’ between delivering a vibrant and beneficial federalism to the Australian public or ‘merely a mask for the effective centralisation of power’. Although the solutions advanced by many commentators towards ensuring the first of these outcomes over the second are many and various, it is notable that none looks exclusively to constitutional amendment as the silver bullet of reform. The notorious difficulty of attaining a successful referendum result – particularly on federal issues which have traditionally been amongst the most contentious proposals –as well as the difficulty of encapsulating all that might be done in the way of federal reform within a single suite of proposed amendments, has ensured that sub-constitutional institutions and mechanisms have been looked to as a simpler, more effective way to achieve change.

Australian constitutionalism appears to be in turmoil. Ever since the Free Speech cases of 1992, commentators have been telling us that constitutionally we have undergone a “glorious revolution” and that Australian constitutionalism has experienced a “fundamental paradigm shift” from parliamentary to popular sovereignty. They have remarked on the “inadequacy of our constitutional theory of government” and urged us to acknowledge “a new foundation on which, step by step, our constitutional jurisprudence will need to be rethought.” This would include a new theory of judicial review.

Some of this hyperbole can be attributed to youthful exuberance and, for older enthusiasts, to the allure of novelty. All are excited by the prospect of implied constitutional rights. The constitutionally “frozen continent” admittedly presented a fertile field for those commentators who have complained of our “impoverished constitutional culture”, bemoaned the absence of “an underrmg [constitutional] philosophy or vision” or even “an overall framework”, and queried the appropriateness of our existing “constitutional concepts, ideals and values ... to the Australia of the late twentieth century”. Our constitutional framers have even been criticised for adopting features of the United States Constitution only “at a secondary machinery level” but “nothing of [its] spirit”; or, as another commentator put it, “drawing on its most conservative, least inspiring features — jettisoning the rest”. The original United States Constitution’s solicitude for slavery was presumably overlooked.