Sir Garfield Barwick prepared this article some considerable time ago. It was in the hands of the publishers well before Sir Owen Dixon's retirement as Chief Justice of the High Court. The Review, including the article, was in course of printing when Sir Garfield's appointment as Chief Justice was announced on 23 April, 1964.

The Committee appointed to review the bankruptcy law of the Commonwealth has made many proposals for its amendment. The Report containing these proposals has been presented to the Attorney-General of the Commonwealth. In this article some of the more important of these proposals will be examined.

In its joint judgment in the Standard Hours Inquiry, 1947 the Full Court of the Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration observed:

The issue, as the history of the case indicates, comes to this Court as a number of industrial disputes (over 100 applications are before the Court) between many registered organizations of workers and their employers who are respondents. Some of these disputes are of long standing; others of them were created when it was known that the Court proposed to make a general investigation into standard hours. It is a commonplace of Australian industrial law that the limit of the constitutional power of the Court is to settle these disputes each within its ambit, and the ultimate judgment will in fact settle these particular disputes, and do no more. But we know, as a matter of practical fact, that it will in the long run lead to uniform standard hours throughout Australia. The responsibility of this onerous task does not properly belong to this Court. It is bound only to settle the dispute. It is something additional that State legislatures and State industrial tribunals make its decisions in these disputes the bases of industrial determinations.

In 1955 the Commonwealth Government passed the Courts-Martial Appeals Act 1955 setting up in Australia a Tribunal to be known as the Courts-Martial Appeal Tribunal. This gave the ultimate review of courts-martial (save that of 'pardon') to civilian lawyers, whereas previously it had been exercised bythe Service concerned itself. The principles to be applied in determining appeals were set out in the Act and are similar to those set out in the Criminal Appeal Act 1912 (N.S.W.)

The refusal of the High Court in Cooney v. Ku-ring-gai Municipal Council to follow Attorney-General (ex rei. Lumley) v. T. S. Gill & Son Ply Ltd should be received enthusiastically by public lawyers and others who consider that individuals should be restrained from breaking the law if their activities operate to the disadvantage of members of the public living in the vicinity. The long reign of Attorney-General v. Gill has ended. In Gill’s case in 1927 the Full Court of the Supreme Court of Victoria declined to grant the Victorian Attorney-General an injunction to restrain the defendant from continuing with the erection of a factory on land situated in a residential area contrary to a by-law of the City of Prahran. The Attorney-General had sought the injunction on the relation of Lumley, a ratepayer of the municipality, who alleged he was injuriously affected by the defendant’s acts which, according to the allegation, also amounted to an invasion of the rights of the ratepayers generally and of the public. The municipality had made no attempt to enforce its own by-law although an offence against the by-law could be punished by fines and continuing penalties.

This digest covers the period 26 March 1963 to 30 October 1963, and is compiled from the published debates of the Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia.

The page references to Parliamentary Debates (‘S. Deb. ’ and ‘H.R. Deb.’) are to the published debates of the Senate and the House of Representatives, for the first Session of the Twenty-fourth Parliament, third and fourth periods.

The scope of this summary is to review Ordinances made under the Seat of Government (Administration) Act 1960-1963 and Regulations made pursuant to such Ordinances, which may be of interest to local practitioners in that they tie in with general schemes of legislation, and practitioners in general where they relate to the legal consequences of acts performed outside the Territory or are intended to provide a model for uniform legislation in the Commonwealth.