On 24 February 2011 the Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced proposals for introduction of a ‘carbon price mechanism’ to commence as early as 1 July 2012. This announcement follows the establishment of a Multi-Party Climate Change Committee on 27 September 2010 with instructions to ‘explore options for the implementation of a carbon price [and] help to build consensus on how Australia will tackle the challenge of climate change’, starting from the position that ‘a carbon price is a necessary economic reform required to reduce carbon pollution’. Earlier in 2010 a major review of the Australian taxation system by Dr Ken Henry was released, providing extensive insights into how the tax system should be restructured ‘to deal with the … environmental challenges of the 21st century’, and its ‘interrelationships [with] … the proposed emissions trading system’. These developments are largely driven by the need for Australia to develop a credible climate change agenda once the Kyoto Protocol arrangements come to an end in 2012.

Amongst the nations of the South Pacific only Australia and New Zealand have no constitutionally entrenched Bills of Rights. New Zealand has no written Constitution at all, whilst in the Australian Constitution there are a number of provisions which have the potential to guarantee some civil and political rights.

The founding fathers of the Australian Constitution were pragmatic people. Almost all of them were parliamentarians and many of them either were, or had been, Premiers or senior Ministers in the governments of the various Australian colonies. They were not leisured gentlemen who took time to consider philosophy, let alone write any of their own. They were not concerned about the rights of humankind, nor did they see their role as one of creating an Australian federal parliament and a government that was required to guarantee, uphold and preserve the rights of the people. On the contrary their aim was to achieve some hard, practical, political goals.

In a federal system there is a constant need to resolve problems created by conflicting provisions of laws enacted by. the federal legislature and those enacted by a state or provincial legislature. In the case of a unitary system it is merely the question of a later statute conflicting with an earlier statute enacted by the same legislature, and in such an instance, the conflict is resolved by regarding the earlier law as having been impliedly repealed by the later law.

In the Australian federal system the conflict is resolved by resorting to the express provisions of s 109 of the Commonwealth Constitution, which reads as follows:

When a law of a State is inconsistent with a law of the Commonwealth, the latter shall prevail, and the former shall, to the extent of the inconsistency, be invalid.

Section 8(4)(f) of the Estate Duty Assessment Act 1914–1974 (Cth) subjects to the charge for federal estate duty certain categories of proceeds of life assurance policies. It has proved to be the most litigated provision in the Act. In this article Professor Lindgren examines the anomalies and uncertainty which characterize the section. He suggests that the comparable provisions in the death duty legislation of the States are to be preferred and concludes that the federal provision should be amended along certain lines.

conscious that the current International Conference of the Red Cross and Red Crescent (International Conference) is taking place at a time when the intolerable suffering of civilians and other victims of armed conflict demands a strong recommitment to our common humanity,

The recent High Court case on the Corporations Act and the reliance therein by the majority on ‘history’ to support their reading of s 51(xx) raises the question of what were prevailing community attitudes to uniform national legislation on corporations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Whilst the views of the delegates to the Conventions and the views of the justices in the High Court in the Huddart, Parker & Co Pty Ltd v Moorehead have been selectively dusted off and resuscitated by the majority justices in the Corporations Act case the broader spectrum of opinion in relation to such matters, both at the time of federation and subsequently, is less well known. Nevertheless such views are also important in arriving at a proper understanding of the meaning of placitum (xx) of s 51.

From the time a Federal Court was first proposed, questions about its jurisdiction, and its relationship with state courts have dominated discussion. While it is not proposed to review this extensive literature in detail, it is apposite to draw on some insights from an article by Sir Garfield Barwick published in 1964 at an early stage of this debate. First, it was suggested that the matters in which a Federal Court should have jurisdiction be in some way special. This special element could, it was said, consist of either a distinctive and separate body of law, a desire for uniformity in the interpretation of Commonwealth law, or the character of a party involved in a matter (eg the Commonwealth or a State). Secondly, and of major importance to the present consideration of the exclusive jurisdiction of Federal Courts, Barwick stated:

Studies of colonialism often associate indirect colonial rule with continuity of the precolonial institutions. Yet, we know less about how colonialism affected the distribution of power between precolonial domestic elites within nominally continuous institutions. We argue that colonial authorities will redistribute power toward elites that are the most congruent with the colonizer’s objectives. We test our theory on the British occupation of Egypt in 1882. Using an original dataset on members of the Egyptian parliament and a difference-in-differences empirical strategy, we show that the colonial authorities shifted parliamentary representation toward the (congruent) landed elite and away from the (oppositional) rural middle class. This shift was greater in cotton-producing provinces which were more exposed to colonial economic interest. Our results demonstrate that the colonial redistribution of power within precolonial institutions can reengineer the social-structural fabric of colonized societies.

The Administrative Decisions (Judicial Review) Act 1977 (Cth) (‘ADJR Act’) provides for judicial review based on decisions ‘to which this Act applies’. Persons aggrieved by ‘a decision to which this Act applies’, conduct engaged in for the purpose of making a decision to which this Act applies, or a failure to make a decision to which this Act applies are able to apply to the Federal Court for an order for review. ‘[D]ecision to which this Act applies’ is defined as a ‘decision of an administrative character, made … under an enactment’. Other similar statutory schemes providing for judicial review also rely on showing that there was or will be a decision made ‘under an enactment’. The High Court decision in Griffith University v Tang is the most recent to consider the meaning of this phrase.

Actuator faults in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can have significant and potentially adverse effects on their safety and performance, highlighting the critical importance of fault diagnosis in UAV design. Ensuring the reliability of these systems in various applications often requires the use of advanced diagnostic algorithms. Artificial intelligence methods, such as deep learning and machine learning techniques, enable fault diagnosis through sample-based learning without the need for prior knowledge of fault mechanisms or physics-based models. However, UAV fault datasets are typically small due to stringent safety standards, which presents challenges for achieving high-performance fault diagnosis. To address this, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms offer a unique advantage by combining deep learning’s automatic feature extraction with reinforcement learning’s interactive learning approach, improving both learning capabilities and robustness. In this study, we propose and evaluate two DRL-based fault diagnosis models, which demonstrate remarkable accuracy in fault diagnosis, consistently exceeding $99{\rm{\% }}$. Notably, under small sample scenarios, the proposed models significantly outperform traditional classifiers such as decision trees, support vector machines, and multilayer perceptron neural networks. These findings suggest that the integration of DRL enhances fault diagnosis performance, particularly in data-limited environments.

Australia will, I believe, ratify the convention and afterwards this Parliament will pass the necessary legislation to show other countries that we join in universal condemnation of the horror [of genocide].

This article advances a new legal theory of the corporation—the “dual view” theory of the corporation. The theory states that the corporation must be explained in two different ways. First, the corporation must be explained internally to the law, as a legal category which acts as a trigger for the application of a set of legal rules. This “inner view” of the corporation says much about the function of the category within the legal system, but very little about why this category was designed to operate in this way. The inner view cannot explain the functions fulfilled by the category in the external world. To gain knowledge of the latter, one must adopt a second view-point, the “outer view”. The corporation must be explained as a legal artefact which facilitates the coordination of social action, whether this be in the economic system, the political system or indeed smaller systems of interaction such as the family.

The competition principles set out in the Trade Practices Act 1974 (Cth) are based on an economic model of perfectly competitive markets responding to the market and producing only the goods and services required in the market. However, effective competition together with good market information may create a disincentive to markets innovating (market failure) because new developments may be rapidly copied without the recovery of the innovation's development costs (a free ride). According to this model, a patent under the Patents Act 1990 (Cth) compensates for the disincentive to innovate and justifies a limited period of exclusive rights during which the innovator may exclude others in order to recover the development costs (confounding the free riders) and contribute to beneficial innovation by investing in new developments (with the added benefit of disclosure of the innovation). Patents are therefore generally assumed to produce overall economic benefit while at the same time having minimal social costs. The social costs are higher prices, restricted outputs, subsidised foreign inventors and the administrative costs of the patenting scheme.