According to the orthodox principles of private international law, as applied within Australia during the twentieth century, the different States are essentially to be regarded as foreign entities. At common law, the courts of one State will generally apply the statutory laws of another State to resolve a civil law dispute if directed to do so by the common law choice of law rules, but not otherwise. Yet federation was a eustatic event in the evolution of the Australian legal system, albeit that the sea change has taken some time to flow through to many areas.

Australian States are not foreign nations but sub-entities within one nation established and maintained by the Australian Constitution. The law to be applied when there is some competition between Australian legal rules cannot appropriately be dictated just by the common law. That raises constitutional questions by its very nature.

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.

In 1888 the social wing of the Salvation Army in Britain had begun an ambitious program for social reform and spiritual revival focusing on the disciplining and retraining of the unemployed. City workshops in London gave unemployed workmen board and lodgings in return for eight hours work a day. Efficiency, deportment and cleanliness were rewarded by increases in food rations and eventually men were given a cash allowance. Attached to the workshops was a labour bureau which would put men in touch with potential employers. In 1905 the Liberal Magazine suggested that the Army be given a government contract to deal with the unemployed and, four years later, the Minority Report of the Poor Law Commission recommended that public authorities work in conjunction with religious organisations in training and reforming the recalcitrant unemployed.