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.

In their majority judgment in the Work Choices Case, five Justices of the High Court endorsed a well known obiter dictum of Windeyer J in Victoria v Commonwealth ('the Payroll Tax Case’). The dictum concerns the Engineers’ Case, which famously repudiated the doctrines of implied intergovernmental immunities and reserved state powers, previously held by the Griffith Court to be entailed by the federal principle implicit in the basic structure of the Constitution. The Court in Engineers declared that both doctrines, and the reasoning on which they were based, were erroneous. But Windeyer J disagreed with this. He said that he had never regarded the decision in Engineers ‘as the correction of antecedent errors or as the uprooting of heresy': it ‘does not to my mind mean that the original judges of the High Court were wrong in their understanding of what at the time of federation was believed to be the effect of the Constitution and in reading it accordingly.'

Technological developments, particularly the advent of the Internet and the mobile phone, have spawned a vast increase in the volume, type and availability of telecommunications information. Mobile phones are now capable of sending and receiving SMS text messages and emails, accessing and downloading material from the Internet, taking photographs, streaming video and audio content and providing GPS navigation. National security and law enforcement agencies frequently wish to access telecommunications information for national security and law enforcement purposes. The desired information may be ‘telecommunications content’ — that is, the actual substance of a communication — or ‘telecommunications data’ — meaning information about a communication but not the substance of it.

This article provides insight into the emerging global-local and public-private nature of professional regulation. Specifically, it reports on recent cross-border interaction to modify professional regulation involving the recognition of qualifications, rights of practice and discipline and ethics. That interaction reveals how – loosely - the regulation of legal competence and conduct has been drawn into a web of global governance. A particular interest is the prominent role that Australian practitioners and officials have played in both multilateral and bilateral relations.

In characterising the way governance of regulation has gone global, Picciotto describes it as a networked field. The governance of regulation has spilled over national borders, yet it has not moved cleanly upwards into a regime of binding public international law. Global governance lacks a clear regulatory hierarchy. Regulatory relations extend out horizontally as well as vertically and they blur the boundaries between public and private regulators.

Our comprehension of the legal means and methods by which military forces are employed, controlled and — where considered necessary — immunised, is incomplete. Some questions are — in a jurisprudential sense — well settled, or at least evolving along a logical, comprehensible, and generally linear course. Thus the scope of the defence power under the Australian Constitution has, on the whole, been relatively consistently interpreted over time as an elastic power — expanding in time of large-scale conflict, contracting in time of profound peace, variably waxing and waning between these two poles in situations of uncertainty less than war but short of settled peace. There have certainly been some new developments in understanding the scope of the power — such as the High Court of Australia’s decision in Thomas v Mowbray (relating to the constitutional validity of the federal control order regime). In this case the majority held that components of the defence power are also exercisable through non-military organs such as the police. But on the whole, our understanding of the power has developed along conceptually and chronologically coherent and logical lines. Similarly, there is no question in the Australian context that this evolution has also been more generally coherent in terms of its interaction with related constitutional questions. Thus Thomas v Mowbray is, in many ways, a belated cross-referral allowing police and intelligence agencies to access authority under the defence power. This merely reflects and accompanies the long established principle that the military forces can likewise be used for law enforcement purposes — as confirmed in Li Chia Hsing v Rankin. It is perhaps justified to say that were we to apply a jus ad bellum / jus in bello approach (law of armed conflict based and thus formally inapplicable, but nevertheless useful) to the problem, the jus ad bellum issues — the when and why of use of military forces in law enforcement operations — are relatively settled, or at least evolving coherently and consistently with their history and precedent.