Traditionally, estoppel by representation cannot interfere with the exercise of a statutory power or the performance of a statutory duty by an administrative body. According to this principle, referred to below as “the traditional rule”, the public purpose served by the statute prevails over the private interest of an individual who may have been misled to the extent of relying on a misrepresentation to his or her detriment. This article begins by examining the ambit of this rule.

The second part of the article analyses the basis for estoppel in administrative law. It will be argued that public law estoppel must be based on analogous private law principles, and not on some unique public law doctrine.

The remainder of the article then considers transposing private law estoppel into a statutory context. Specifically, it deals with the application of estoppel to representations about intra vires exercises of power, and then examines representations about ultra vires administrative action.

Garfield Edward John Barwick, born on 22 June 1903, is undoubtedly one of the most important Australians of the century. As counsel, Barwick had an important role in the landmark cases in the High Court and the Privy Council in the 1940s and the 1950s. As Attorney-General for the Commonwealth through 1958 to 1963, he was involved in initiatives in matrimonial causes, company law and trade practices. Sir Garfield's career also included service as Minister for External Affairs (1961-1964).

This book of his recollections and reflections has a clarity and force which come in part from its simplicity of style and in part from the personality of the author. It provides an important historical record of Sir Garfield's view of a number of key events in Australian history — especially Australian legal history. It also provides insight into the philosophy and values of this influential Australian lawyer.

It may be true that morality cannot be legislated, but behaviour can be regulated. The law may not change the heart, but it can restrain the heartless.

Coinfection of a host by more than 1 parasite is more common than single infection in wild environments and can have differing impacts, although coinfections have relatively rarely been quantified. Host immune responses to coinfection can contribute to infection costs but are often harder to predict than those associated with single infection, due to the influence of within-host parasite–parasite interactions on infection virulence. To first quantify coinfection in a common bird species, and then to test for immune-related impacts of coinfection, we investigated the prevalence and immune response to avian haemosporidian (genera: Plasmodium, Haemoproteus and Leucocytozoon) coinfection in wild blackbirds. Coinfection status was diagnosed using a 1-step multiplex polymerase chain reaction, immune response was quantified through white blood cell counts and heterophil: lymphocyte ratios, and parasitaemia was quantified for each infected sample. We detected high rates of haemosporidian infection and coinfection, although neither impacted immune activity, despite a significantly higher parasitaemia in individuals experiencing double vs single infection. This suggests that immune-related costs of haemosporidian single and coinfection are low in this system. This could be due to long-term host–parasite coevolution, which has decreased infection virulence, or a consequence of reduced costs associated with chronic infections compared to acute infections. Alternatively, our results may obscure immune-related costs associated with specific combinations of coinfecting haemosporidian genera, species or lineages. Future research should investigate interactions that occur between haemosporidian parasites within hosts, as well as the ways in which these interactions and resulting impacts may vary depending on parasite identity.

In this article Mr Justice Kirby outlines a number of important legal themes in the career of the former Prime Minister. Several issues were identified by him soon after Mr Whitlam entered Parliament and persisted with in Opposition and Government. Some of them led to important legislative reforms. The abolition of appeals to the Privy Council was achieved in part. The establishment of a new Federal Court, long predicted, has now been achieved. Major reform of family law and the establishment of a special Family Court was pioneered with the support of Mr Whitlam. The expansion of Commonwealth interests in commercial and business law coincided with facultative decisions of the High Court. The achievement of a single corporation law and of national compensation eluded the Whitlam Government but may yet be secured. The identification of the need for a new administrative law is instanced as the most original of Mr Whitlam's law reform preoccupations. The new body of Commonwealth administrative law was initiated during his Administration. This paper is a history not an evaluation. But it identifies a number of themes important for continuing law reform in Australia and illustrates Mr Whitlam's persistence, and in some cases successful action, towards achieving reform of the law.

Recently, the High Court of Australia has again concerned itself with the need for the common law to conform to the Constitution and with the manner in which, and extent to which, such conformity is ensured. In the 1990s, the Court considered the effect of the Constitution's guarantee of freedom of speech on defamation law and reached at length, in Lange v Australian Broadcasting Corporation, a common position on the influence of the Constitution on the common law which enjoys the support of the whole Court. The consensus thus reached has now been applied in John Pfeiffer v Rogerson to the area of choice-of-law in tort.

Choice of law is another area in which, during the Court's fin de siécle period in the late 1980s and 1990s, there was considerable disagreement among members of the Court. The well-known succession of cases started with Breavington v Godleman in 1988. Some members of the Court held that the applicable choice-of-law doctrine in intra-national cases was mandated by the terms of the Constitution and to be found by applying a command allegedly inherent in s 118 (possibly with the aid of other constitutional provisions).

Constitutional authority over resources and environmental questions resides principally in the States in Australia, but there are many powers which the Federal Government can develop, either alone or together with the States, in working out national policies in these areas. Although the constitutional issues are important, resolution of land use problems is fundamentally a matter of competition for power and authority within the political system.

Professor Whalan suggests four stages in the development of environmental law: (a) totally resource-oriented statutes with possible overlaps and clashes between separate uses; (b) integration of the separate codes and the introduction into those codes of environmentally oriented protective provisions; (c) the enactment of statutes directed towards a specific environmental problem or problems; and (d) the development of overview bodies with advisory and supervisory functions to which the protective responsibilities may be added.

In these statutory moves towards macro-environmental law in Australia, the Courts have been given a very limited role and it is argued that much of the law is not normative in character but procedural, administrative and discretionary. In very many cases, ultimate control is political rather than judicial.

Natural justice — Judicial review — Armed forces — Air force officer — Power to dismiss where appointment held at pleasure — Governor-General in Council — Air Force Regulations 1927 (Cth) regulations 72(1), 628(1)

Flight Lieutenant Coutts was an officer in the Royal Australian Air Force. In 1980 the Governor-General in Council terminated his appointment on medical grounds in accordance with Regulations 72(1) and 628(1) of the Air Force Regulations, 1927 (Cth). Regulation 72(1) reads:

The last decade of the nineteenth century saw a number of Conventions held for the purpose of creating the rules under which the Australian colonies would federate in “one indissoluble federal Commonwealth”. The endeavour was designed to be an anchor to the past, creating rules that bind until a super-majority of the living change them. These rules were incorporated into a written document, which declares itself to be the paramount law within the Commonwealth of Australia.

We consider log Calabi-Yau surfaces $(Y, D)$ with singular boundary. In each deformation type, there is a distinguished surface $(Y_e,D_e)$ such that the mixed Hodge structure on $H_2(Y \setminus D)$ is split. We prove that (1) the action of the automorphism group of $(Y_e,D_e)$ on its nef effective cone admits a rational polyhedral fundamental domain; and (2) the action of the monodromy group on the nef effective cone of a very general surface in the deformation type admits a rational polyhedral fundamental domain. These statements can be viewed as versions of the Morrison cone conjecture for log Calabi–Yau surfaces. In addition, if the number of components of D is no greater than six, we show that the nef cone of $Y_e$ is rational polyhedral and describe it explicitly. This provides infinite series of new examples of Mori Dream Spaces.

Why does religion continue to emerge as a flashpoint in the age of secularization? Although models of religious resurgence suggest that religious cleavages are more prominent in the modern era, other models continue to show declining religious involvement. What is needed is a theory that can observe both resurgence and secularization at the same time. I argue that globalization—and the flow of people across borders, in particular—provokes a religious backlash at the societal level due to its secularizing effects. As the public is exposed to new and diverse religious traditions, religiosity declines; as a result, however, religious practitioners become more aggressive toward other religious groups. I test this theory using data on globalization, religious discrimination, and religious practice. I find that types of globalization dealing with the flow of people and information across borders have an outsize effect on societal religious discrimination, or SRD. This effect, however, is contingent on a decline in religious practice. This study suggests that religious resurgence can take place in secularizing environments, and that both resurgence and secularization share root causes.