Monumental roads were constructed during the ninth to thirteenth centuries by the regional society centred on Chaco Canyon in the US Southwest. Here, the authors present new lidar and field documentation of parallel roads at the Gasco Site, which sits within a ritual landscape south of Chaco Canyon. Their findings reveal that the Gasco Road is substantially longer than previously believed and forms alignments between natural springs and towards the winter solstice sunrise over Mount Taylor, a mountain sacred among contemporary Indigenous peoples. These findings highlight the agency of landscapes and skyscapes in structuring ritual practices in ancient societies worldwide.

Anti-discrimination law in Australia is at a crossroads. After four decades of proliferation of legislation to regulate discrimination, national attention has turned from increasing regulation to legislative consolidation and reform. This article contributes a theoretical analysis to the reform debate. Two liberal theoretical justifications for prohibiting discrimination, harm and redistributive justice, are considered. This investigation assists to determine when the state should intervene in order to restrict discrimination, and whether state and territory anti-discrimination regimes have a legitimate continuing role in Australia's legislative landscape.

We propose and unify classes of different models for information propagation over graphs. In a first class, propagation is modelled as a wave, which emanates from a set of known nodes at an initial time, to all other unknown nodes at later times with an ordering determined by the arrival time of the information wave front. A second class of models is based on the notion of a travel time along paths between nodes. The time of information propagation from an initial known set of nodes to a node is defined as the minimum of a generalised travel time over subsets of all admissible paths. A final class is given by imposing a local equation of an eikonal form at each unknown node, with boundary conditions at the known nodes. The solution value of the local equation at a node is coupled to those of neighbouring nodes with lower values. We provide precise formulations of the model classes and prove equivalences between them. Finally, we apply the front propagation models on graphs to semi-supervised learning via label propagation and information propagation on trust networks.

This is the third series in the annual Menzies Lecture series. The lectures were delivered at the University of Virginia and at William and Mary College Williamsburg on 8 and 12 October 1987.

In Singh v Commonwealth (‘Singh’), the High Court was presented with the question whether a person born in Australia can be considered an ‘alien’ for the purpose of s 51(xix) of the Constitution (‘naturalization and aliens’). In a 5:2 decision the Court rejected the plaintiff's argument that birth in Australia necessarily accorded her the status of non-alien and thus a constitutional nationality which could not be displaced by legislative reliance on other heads of power. The decision is important, both for its elucidation of Parliament's scope to regulate Australian citizenship — the subject of a series of important cases over the last two decades involving strong dissents and two reversals in approach — and for its consideration of principles of constitutional interpretation.

Although some fifteen years have passed since Australia ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and so incurred an obligation to respect, protect, promote and ensure each individual's “right to adequate housing”, in Australia the right remains little more than a rhetorical tool used by welfare activists. Despite the increased political and legal profIle of human rights in Australia with the establishment of such bodies as the Commonwealth's Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC), the “right to .adequate housing”, like many other economic rights, has been largely ignored. In an attempt to highlight the gap between Australia's international commibnent and its domestic response, the first part of this paper examines the Eontent and implications of the right to adequate housing and Australia's obligation under Article 11 of the ICESCR. The second part focuses on the Federal Goyernment's response, discussing in particular the absence of any legal provision· for the right's protection and the lack of comprehensive administrative policies aimed at the right's progressive realisation. For the purposes of this latter discussion, a case study of federal policies concerning the homeless, a group most apparently lacking in “adequate housing”, demonstrates the extent to which administrative policies continue to embrace notions of “worthiness” rather than “universal dignity”, making realisation of a “right to adequate housing” impossible.

One of the primary consequences of the difficulties experienced by companies and by regulators in the decade of the 1980s has been a greater focus on corporate governance. The precise meaning and content of this expression is far from clear. It seems to be a term used to describe a number of related phenomena that are influencing the way in which companies are being managed, governed and regulated. The mode of governance of companies is being influenced by the growth in institutional investment, an increased focus on the role of the board of directors, increased levels of disclosure of financial information, as well as by the chal1ging and developing roles of regulatory bodies such as the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX), the Australian Securities Commission(ASC), and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC).

The Commonwealth grants power refers to the legislative power conferred by section 96 of the federal Constitution. Section 96 provides that:

There is no exact counterpart of this section in the United States Constitution, though Congress has authority to make grants to States under the so-called General Welfare clause—section 8 of Article I—which declares that:

Administrative law folklore in Australia concentrated for so long on the amusing British cases that portrayed courts as unpredictable and interventionist. Colourful examples included Roberts v Hopwood, which saw the proposal of the Poplar Borough Council to pay equal wages to men and women overturned as an eccentric and feminist exercise in socialistic philanthropy; Prescott v Birmingham Corporation, which displayed the same judicial aversion to a Council proposal to provide free bus transport to elderly pensioners; and Padfield v Minister of Agriculture, which disparaged a naively expressed but politically understandable Ministerial decision not to conduct an enquiry into inefficiencies in a milk marketing scheme.

The Australian reality, it was often overlooked, was usually more predictable and less interventionist. A predominant theme was the pertinence of judicial restraint in penetrating the exercise of a broad administrative discretion. Accordingly, some of the foundation cases of Australian administrative law reached conclusions which, by contemporary standards, seem astonishing.

This article discusses the legal regulation of parenting in lesbian and gay families in Australia. This landscape of regulation includes laws that govern such families both before and after they are formed; that is, laws controlling access to potential family formation options in addition to laws that govern the status of parents and children in families that are formed through alternate means. There have been a number of important developments in these areas in recent years, including: challenges to laws that restrict access to fertility services; reforms to adoption laws in three jurisdictions; and deemed parental status for co-mothers in lesbian families formed through assisted reproduction in three jurisdictions. This article will detail how the new parental status reforms interrelate, including difficult questions regarding the recognition of this new parental status in other States and their interaction with federal law.

We live in times of escalating activity of investigative tribunals uncovering corruption, crime, discrimination and violations of public service discipline. Investigation by agencies of the executive branch of government has become an industry, a form of regulation and policy-making which ranges well beyond the occasional royal commission. This has been matched by an escalating concern of civil libertarians and courts regarding the damage which investigative tribunals may do to those who are investigated or named in their proceedings. There is a question whether the expressed concern of the courts, the protection of reputation, is warranted in the light of the accountability of such tribunals by means of judicial review. The degree to which investigative tribunals cause damage to individuals in a manner which infringes their fundamental rights is constantly a matter of controversy. The degree of success achieved by the tribunals in pursuing their statutory objectives is also often a matter of controversy.

People who lose their jobs as a consequence of discriminatory treatment at work face an array of options for redress. They might bring proceedings for unfair dismissal before a statutory tribunal (the Fair Work Commission), or they may pursue a claim in the Federal Court of Australia. This article contemplates the possibility that the system for dealing with discriminatory dismissal could be rationalized so that aggrieved employees might have a single, accessible pathway through an administrative process to deal with such complaints. This would involve rethinking whether discrimination complaints ought to be treated as a matter of vindicating legal rights, or as a matter of arbitrating competing interests. Abandoning the language of rights may facilitate a pathway around the Boilermakers' doctrine (which mandates that only Chapter III courts can determine legal rights), and so enable the establishment of a more accessible and effective avenue for dealing with discrimination at work.

There has been a vigorous debate both judicially and academically about the correct approach to constitutional interpretation. An aspect of that debate has involved the role of assumptions in informing our interpretation of the Constitution. I have argued elsewhere that ‘some assumptions form part of the fabric upon which the written words of the Constitution are superimposed … where the assumption is integral to a proper understanding of the structure and text of the Constitution, it can be both used and applied in constitutional interpretation.’

The ‘executive power of the Commonwealth’ is conferred by s 61 of the Commonwealth Constitution. Section 61 provides that ‘the executive power of the Commonwealth is vested in the Queen and is exercisable by the Governor-General’. Neither that section nor any other informs us as to what ‘the executive power’ is. Nor does the structure of the Commonwealth Constitution provide much of a hint of it.