In 2006, Parliament made major amendments to the Family Law Act 1975 (Cth) (‘Family Law Act’) to encourage a greater level of shared parenting, and to give greater emphasis to the importance of children maintaining a relationship with both parents in the absence of violence or abuse. There are major differences between trial judges in how to apply the new laws to the problem of parental relocation — where the primary caregiver wants to move a long way from the other. The central problem is determining how much importance should be given to a parent's freedom of movement given this greater emphasis on the involvement of both parents. There are stark differences in the policy and approach of different trial judges, which have yet to be resolved by an authoritative and carefully reasoned decision of an appellate court.

This article examines these substantial differences in view between judges on this issue since the 2006 amendments, and proposes a way forward based upon revisiting the leading judgment of Kirby J in the High Court in AMS v AIF.

Policy formation has displaced the diffused and incremental operation of the common law as our primary means of social regulation … In the process, the nature of legislation itself has undergone a major change. It no longer consists of rules that displace or supplement the common law: contemporary legislatures … enact a wide range of … provisions that bear little resemblance to our traditional concept of law. For these functions we have no adequate theory, no general account of how such statutes should be designed ....

This article provides an edition of a group of unpublished cuneiform tablets from the Old Babylonian period (c. 2003–1595 BCE) excavated at the archaeological site of Tall Ḥarmal, ancient Šaduppûm. The texts consist of economic accounts as well as one round school tablet. The former in particular highlight some aspects of agriculture and land use when the city was under the control of king Ibāl-pî-El II (1779–1765 BCE) of Ešnunna. Thanks to the systematic excavations, most of the Šaduppûm texts are stored in the Iraq Museum and can fortunately be associated with their archaeological context, which makes it easier to reconstruct their archival relationships.

The abolition of all appeals from the High Court to the Privy Council, coupled with the High Court’s recent statement that it no longer regards itself as bound by Privy Council decisions, highlights the fact that appeals still lie, in many matters of State jurisdiction, from State Supreme Courts direct to the Privy Council. In this article, Mr Gilbert is primarily concerned to examine the extent to which section 106 of the Commonwealth Constitution may provide protection for these “direct” appeals. To this end, Mr Gilbert examines what case-law exists on section 106, and attempts to place the section in perspective in relation to the rest of the Constitution. The difficult (and largely unexplored) relationship between section 106 and section 51 is considered, to discover the possible reaches of Commonwealth legislative power with respect to the subject-matter protected by section 106. The position of “direct” appeals within the States’ constitutional structures is looked at, in order to determine the possible ambit of whatever protection is offered by section 106, and finally, Mr Gilbert analyses the recent comments by Mr lustice Murphy that the abolition of Privy Council appeals from the High Court has meant the consequential demise of “direct” appeals from State courts.

Australia acceded to the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees (the Refugee Convention) on 21 January 1954 and acceded to the 1967 Protocol relating to the Status of Refugees (the Refugee Protocol) on 13 December 1973. The prohibition on refoulement is the key provision of the Refugee Convention. Article 33(1) provides that no State “shall expel or return (“refouler”) a refugee in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers of territories where his life or freedom would be threatened on account of his race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.” Article 33(2) provides that the benefit of article 33(1) cannot be invoked by a refugee “whom there are reasonable grounds for regarding as a danger to the security of the country in which he is, or who, having been convicted by a final judgment of a particularly serious crime, constitutes a danger to the community of that country.”

It has been an eventful year for the Criminal Code (Cth). Chapter 2 General Principles of Criminal Responsibility ('Chapter 2’) emerged unscathed, indeed reinforced, as a consequence of judicial scrutiny by the High Court in R v Tang and it was the subject of an extended exposition of the principles of statutory interpretation, incorporating elements of his McPherson Lectures, by Spigelman CJ in R v JS. The High Court decision is remarkable for the strict literalism of its interpretation of Part 2.2 The elements of an offence. The judgment of Kirby J, though dissenting in the outcome, provides a valuable addition to his earlier judgment in R v Barlow, on the principles of interpretation of legislation codifying the criminal law. Danger signs are apparent, however, in an equally literal reading of Chapter 2 by the Queensland Court of Criminal Appeal in Crowther v Sala, which will be discussed later in this essay. As appellate case law on Chapter 2 grows, stresses on its structure that were unforeseen by its framers have begun to accumulate. If Chapter 2 is to continue to guide Parliament and courts in the formulation and interpretation of criminal legislation it will require continuing legislative maintenance.

The effectiveness of the tax system is crucial to the funding of government. The tax administration is given exceptional powers to enable it to enforce tax laws and thus achieve revenue outcomes acceptable to government. The performance of the tax administration affects the efficiency of the national economy. But though it is crucial to the functioning of government and the economy and though it raises major questions as to the application of public law values, tax administration has not been a major field of study for lawyers. However, that may be changing and, co-incidentally, substantial governmental reviews of tax administration in Australia and New Zealand have recently been published. For ease of reference they will be referred to as the Australian Report and the New Zealand Report respectively.

The Attorney-General: [Clark, told the Legislative Assembly that] … Sir Samuel Griffith, Mr Kingston and himself knew what they were doing. They went to work with their eyes open and he claimed part of the responsibility, or glory, or whatever they might call it.

Mr Dobson: A march towards republicanism.

The Attorney-General: said they could call it what they liked. If it was republicanism, then Sir Samuel Griffith was a good republican, and he was as good a one as he [Clark].

A report of the debate on the Draft Constitution in the Tasmanian Legislative Assembly. Hobart Mercury 18 August, 1897.

Executive accountability is the central concern of administrative law and accountability, in administrative law terms, is achieved principally by a system of judicial and tribunal review of administrative decision-making. The ease with which citizens can approach courts and tribunals for review of government action, therefore, becomes an accountability issue. In turn, that raises the question of the tests for standing and any other jurisdictional gateways to review. This article is not concerned with issues of standing and whether a person is “aggrieved”. However, it will discuss the jurisdictional tests which must be satisfied in order to obtain review by the Federal Court (generally referred to as “judicial review”) and the Commonwealth Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT/Tribunal) (generally referred to as “administrative review”). The statutory tests are designed to determine the point in the decision-making process at which judicial and administrative review is permissible. The underlying hypothesis is that the jurisdictional tests have been devised to strike a balance between protecting the rights of individuals affected by government decisions while preserving efficient administration.

Pirrie v McFarlane remains an enigmatic case. Decided a few years after the landmark decision of Engineers it reflected an application of the reciprocal nature of the principle applied in that case. The thrust of the decision in Engineers was that the Commonwealth Parliament had power under s 51(xxxv) to make laws binding on the States. In the course of judgment the majority judges had also observed as follows:

Coming so soon after Engineers, the decision in Pirrie v McFarlane is clearly consistent with this observation of the majority judges. However, given the subsequent developments in cases such as Cigamatic and Bogle, the authority of Pirrie v McFarlane has been questioned.

Low-flying aircraft are susceptible to attacks by ground-launched infrared (IR)-guided man portable air defence system (MANPADS) and surface-to-air missiles (SAM). When seen from direct below, a dual band sensor can lock on to either exhaust plume or aircraft surfaces. Based on the magnitude of the IR signature, the missile can use any one source for the terminal guidance. In this study, the IR signature of the aircraft surface and potential plume core is analysed and compared from direct bottom view in different IR bands. In the Long Wave Infrared (LWIR) band, the surface emission is higher and in the Medium Wave Infrared (MWIR) band the plume emission is higher. The plume (MWIR) emission is higher than the surface (LWIR) emission for low Mach numbers, but as the Mach number increases the plume (MWIR) to surface (LWIR) emission ratio decreases, and at supersonic Mach numbers the surface LWIR signature is higher than the plume MWIR signature. The plume MWIR to surface LWIR ratio further depends on the engine power, altitude of operation and the emissivity of the aircraft surface. In the reheat mode, plume MWIR emission is always higher than the surface LWIR emission. The dual band IR detector can be a combination of short wave infrared (SWIR)-MWIR, SWIR-LWIR, and the MWIR-LWIR band. The MWIR-LWIR dual band combination is the best suited combination of IR windows for a dual band IR sensor/detector for aircraft application.

The proscription of organisations has long been a central feature of legal regimes aimed at the suppression of terrorism. Australia is no exception. Going back many decades, the Commonwealth government has sought to meet the threat of political violence through the proscription of related organisations. In the wake of the September 11 terrorist strikes against New York and Washington, renewed efforts were made for the proscription of organisations in many national jurisdictions (for example, the United Kingdom, United States and Canada) as well as at the international level (for example, through the United Nations and the European Union.

In Australia, the Commonwealth looked directly to the justifications offered by the United Kingdom’s Lord Lloyd of Berwick and Paul Wilkinson just a few years before. In their major Inquiry into Legislation Against Terrorism, Lord Lloyd and Wilkinson presented three principal rationales to explain the role of proscription in the prevention of terrorism: ease of proof; providing a basis for the criminalisation of fundraising and other activities of terrorist groups; and as a clear symbol of ‘public revulsion and reassurance that severe measures [are] being taken’.

For some time, universities have appreciated the commercial significance of ownership of patents and inventions produced during employment and address this both in contracts and university statutes. However, one cannot say the same about copyright. Until relatively recently, there were few contractual or internal university statutory provisions for copyright ownership so statute and common law principles governed the position. This absence of contractual provisions, combined with the general lack of institutional concern for testing and enforcing copyright ownership rights, resulted in uncertainty as to where ownership rights reside. In recent years, this uncertainty has become a major concern for institutions which are now anxious to know the extent to which they can enforce copyright ownership rights. Universities generally have begun to take a more active interest in the economic benefits of exploiting intellectual property in academic works and, in particular, in exploiting copyright. There are many factors responsible for this change in attitude.

In a recent issue of the Australian Law Journal Enid Campbell argued that both the length of High Court judgments and the number of multiple separate High Court judgments has increased and that this is counterproductive. This view echoes similar concerns expressed by some judges and others in the profession. This argument is based on several assumptions about the High Court that are widely held among lawyers, but which have not been subject to any detailed empirical research. Those assumptions are:

1. (a) High Court judgments have become significantly longer in recent times.

2. (b) There is an increase in the number of concurring judgments on the High Court.

3. (c) There is an increase in the number of dissenting judgments on the High Court.

Galaxy morphology in stellar light can be described by a series of “non-parametric” or “morphometric” parameters, such as concentrationasymmetry-smoothness, Gini, M20, and Sersic fit. These parameters can be applied to column density maps of atomic hydrogen (Hi). The Hi distribution is susceptible to perturbations by environmental effects, e.g. inter-galactic medium pressure and tidal interactions. Therefore, Hi morphology can potentially identify galaxies undergoing ram-pressure stripping or tidal interactions. We explore three fields in theWALLABY Pilot Hi survey and identify perturbed galaxies based on a k-nearest Neighbor (kNN) algorithm using an Hi morphometric feature space. For training, we used labeled galaxies in the combined NGC 4808 and NGC 4636 fields with six Hi morphometrics to train and test a kNN classifier. The kNN classification is proficient in classifying perturbed galaxies with all metrics –accuracy, precision and recall– at 70-80%. By using the kNN method to identify perturbed galaxies in the deployment field, the NGC 5044 mosaic, we find that in most regards, the scaling relations of perturbed and unperturbed galaxies have similar distribution in the scaling relations of stellar mass vs star formation rate and the Baryonic Tully-Fisher relation, but the Hi and stellar mass relation flatter than of the unperturbed galaxies. Our results for NGC 5044 provide a prediction for future studies on the fraction of galaxies undergoing interaction in this catalogue and to build a training sample to classify such galaxies in the fullWALLABY survey.

The concept of self-regulation in all of its forms has become a foundation stone in the theoretical and practical debates about the role and function of the modern ‘decentred’ regulatory state. In the decentred state, government, among other things, ceases to rely upon the old tool of ‘command and control’ regulation to achieve social policy goals. Instead, government relies on alternative systems developed by industry and others and faces the arguably more daunting challenge of trying to harness the internal regulatory capacity of these other regulatory systems, directing and steering them in a way that ensures they deliver the goods and services sought by society in accordance with accepted social values. Although the focus of the theoretical regulatory debate has started to shift to the meta-regulatory potential of law and the ability of government to ‘regulate self-regulation’, the question of how and why self-regulatory rule-making regimes actually emerge remains largely unexplored from an empirical standpoint.

Though at times inconvenient for lawyers and their clients, the use by the Commonwealth of delegated legislation to fill lacunae in statutes is hardly remarkable, and the constitutional validity of provisions authorising that use even less a matter of controversy. Nonetheless, there may be reason to doubt whether the same can so readily be said of the inclusion in Commonwealth statutes of so-called ‘Henry VIII’ clauses – that is, statutory provisions purporting to authorise the promulgation of subordinate legislation that either amends or is inconsistent with the relevant principal statute. In particular, one might ask to what extent such provisions may, regardless of their width, be accommodated within the distribution of power contemplated by the text and structure of the Constitution.

The task of answering this question requires, as a first step, that fresh consideration be given to the limits, if any, upon Parliament’s ability to confer on other institutions some part of the legislative power of the Commonwealth.