The availability of reasons for decisions is an important part of recent developments in Commonwealth administration. As Mrs Burnett’s scholarly analysis shows, these developments have not been without their uncertainties. I would like to pursue a few of the issues raised in her paper and mention some issues associated with providing reasons for decisions in the Repatriation area.

There is much to be said for a person affected by a decision having a right to obtain full written reasons for the decision. This enables the person affected to find out why the particular decision has been made. It may also provide a possible basis for challenge to the decision. As Mrs Burnett notes, the need to give reasons has also been described as encouraging consistency and better quality in decision-making.

The right of petitioning Parliament is a fimdamental right of the citizen, allowing any individual or body of individuals to take grievances directly before Parliament. It is one of the most direct means of communication between the people and the Parliament. It is by this means that people can voice their concerns to the House on matters ofpublic interest.

Australian electoral legislation provides both a regulatory and punitive scheme designed to overcome electoral corruption and malpractice. Much of this legislation has been based on British models. The article commences by detailing the existing British legislation and its merits. Extended consideration is then given to the sections of Australian electoral legislation dealing with the conduct of candidates for election and their supporters. The former British legislation which has been imitated in various Australian jurisdictions is identified and the effectiveness of the present Australian electoral legislation is compared with that presently in force in the United Kingdom. As well, the principal electoral offences and controls on electoral expenditure in each of the States and the Commonwealth are considered at length. The analysis in this regard is complemented by a schedule to the article comparing the existence of, and penalties for, 48 electoral offences under various electoral statutes in Australia and the United Kingdom. Dr Finn concludes the article by arguing for reform in a number of specified areas of Australian electoral legislation.

In [15], using methods from ergodic theory, a longstanding conjecture of Erdős (see [5, Page 305]) about sumsets in large subsets of the natural numbers was resolved. In this paper, we extend this result to several important classes of amenable groups, including all finitely generated virtually nilpotent groups and all abelian groups $(G,+)$ with the property that the subgroup $2G := \{g+g : g\in G\}$ has finite index. We prove that in any group G from the above classes, any $A\subset G$ with positive upper Banach density contains a shifted product set of the form $\{tb_ib_j\colon i<j\}$, for some infinite sequence $(b_n)_{n\in \mathbb {N}}$ and some $t\in G$. In fact, we show this result for all amenable groups that posses a property which we call square absolute continuity. Our results provide answers to several questions and conjectures posed in [13].

Erskine May's Parliamentary Practice, the procedural bible of the House of Commons, is about to lose its place as the inevitable reference guide for Australian parliamentarians. At the end of 1981 the House of Representatives Practice was published, joining the long established Australian Senate Practice to provide the first complete Australian guide to the procedures of both Houses of the Commonwealth Parliament. The old editions of May's Parliamentary Practice, reciting the procedure of the Commons at the turn of the century, have some residual importance for the Federal Parliament (of which more later) but that too is likely to disappear. Within a few years, May's will disappear from the shelves of parliamentary clerks in Canberra and be relegated to library shelves for the benefit of students of British politics and parliamentary affairs.

The Australian replacement of May's has been a long time coming. Mr JR Odgers produced his first edition of Australian Senate Practice in 1953. Revised editions followed fairly regularly, the fourth appearing in 1972 and the fifth (and still current) edition in 1976. But it was not until 1975 that the House of Representatives decided that it was proper to begin working on an equivalent and to put on record some of its answers to Mr Odgers.

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).