The main purpose of this article is to review the limitations that will be imposed by the Privy Council (Limitation of Appeals) Bill on appeals to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council from the High Court of Australia, federal courts other than the High Court, and the Supreme Courts of the Territories as well as the limitations and restrictions which now apply to appeals to the Privy Council from the High Court and courts exercising federal jurisdiction.

The battles over official secrecy have to be fought on many different fronts. In the United Kingdom—whose ministers and public servants allegedly have a “passion for secrecy”—this was more than usually evident during 1967. Two pieces of legislation—namely, the Parliamentary Commissioner Act, 1967 (U.K.) and the Public Records Act, 1967 (Eng.)—represented a modest triumph for those who would wish to see more light shed upon the affairs of the nation. Elsewhere the picture was rather more familiar. The Security Commission recommended a further tightening of documentary security in the Cabinet Office; this followed upon the conviction under the Official Secrets Acts, 1911 to 1939 (U.K.) of a young typist in the Cabinet Office, “the first known occasion on which classified papers have been extracted from” this inner sanctum of government.

The only mention of juries in the Commonwealth Constitution is in section 80, which provides (inter alia) that “The trial on indictment of any offence against any law of the Commonwealth shall be by jury”. Apart from cases on the question what is meant by “ trial on indictment ”, there is not a great deal of authority on the constitutional questions that arise in relation to juries, civil and criminal, in federal jurisdiction.

One is not often called upon to review for a law journal a book which is not written either by a lawyer or specifically for a lawyer. Mr Stanley Brogden's Australia's Two-Airline Policy is such a book and its paper jacket states that the book is of particular interest for students of economics, public administration, business administration, political science and for general readers and libraries. Since, however, the Melbourne University Press is noted for its publication of serious and scholarly works, and further, because the two-airline policy cannot properly be understood without an adequate grasp of the legal and constitutional framework in which it operates, it seems quite proper to make an assessment of Mr Brogden's work. Mr Brogden is a very experienced aviation writer as the book will quickly demonstrate. It is the purpose of this review not only to assess the book on its merits but also to supplement the account of the two-airline policy by a closer examination of legal issues and some observations on the future implications of the policy.

If it is in any sense true that the establishment of the federal arbitration system created “a new province for law and order” as Higgins asserted, then it is certainly true that the concept of the basic wage as a foundational element in all awards of that system made in settlement of interstate industrial disputes became the single most important factor in the development of that law and of that order. From the Harvester judgment of 1907 emerged the structure of:

1. (i) a basic wage common to all workers irrespective of the work upon which, or the industry in which, they were employed and

2. (ii) a secondary wage or margin for the skill, responsibility, or particular circumstances of the work, or industry, in question

which was the distinguishing feature of wage determination in Australia for the next sixty years. All federal and State industrial tribunals operated with in this structural framework, either by legislative direction, or as a result of their own deliberate decisions based upon a common acceptance of this structure by the parties coming before these tribunals.

This Digest is intended to provide lawyers with a key to those questions and Ministerial Statements in the Commonwealth Parliament in which they are most likely to be interested, and it is, of course, selective. It covers the period 21 February to 8 November 1967, and is compiled from the published debates of the Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia.