Australia in the 1990s, like most other industrialised countries, is characterised by its high level of technological development, the increased automation of transactions between businesses and their customers and the reversal of pre-existing trends towards large government. These factors have combined to create an environment in which the issue of privacy and, in particular, the need for a private sector regime to protect privacy has begun to feature on the political agenda.

The need to regulate personal information became a matter of concern for the first time in Australia in the context of the controversy generated by an unsuccessful attempt to introduce a national identity card, the Australia Card. The main concern at that time focussed on the need to regulate the activities of the government; the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth), which was enacted in conjunction with initiatives to extend the use of the tax file number as a de facto identifier, covered only the activities of the Commonwealth public sector.

In any field of law . . . there may arise the rare “landmark” case in which a court, usually a final appellate court, concludes that the circumstances are such as to entitle and oblige it to reassess the content of some rule or set of rules in the context of current social conditions, standards and demands and to change or reverse the direction of the development of the law.

In 1995 I wrote a short piece entitled ‘The Forgotten “Trust”: The People and the State’. Its premise was the simple proposition that the most fundamental of fiduciary relationships in our society is that which exists between the State (and its officers and agencies) and the community (the people). I do not intend here to revisit the justifications for that proposition. My primary concern when I wrote was with two quite different legal manifestations of that proposition. The first was its use in informing and justifying the imposition of legally enforceable standards of conduct on public officers and agencies. The second was how trust and fiduciary ideas have been, and could be, invoked to circumscribe and channel the exercise of public power for the benefit or protection of the public or a section of it. It is the second – and much more problematic – of these that I wish to revisit in this article. I do so not simply to satisfy Leslie Zines that I have reconsidered a ‘heresy’ into which he believed I was misguidedly lured.

Constitutional systems of Westminster heritage are increasingly moving towards fixed-term parliaments to, amongst other things, prevent the Premier or Prime Minister opportunistically calling a ‘snap election’. Amongst the Australian states, qualified fixed-term parliaments currently exist in New South Wales, South Australia and Victoria. Queensland, Tasmania and Western Australia have also deliberated over whether to establish similar fixed-term parliaments. However, manner and form provisions in those states' constitutions entrench the Parliament's duration, Governor's Office and dissolution power. In Western Australia and Queensland, unlike Tasmania, such provisions are doubly entrenched. This article considers whether these entrenching provisions present legal obstacles to constitutional amendments establishing fixed-term parliaments in those two states. This involves examining whether laws fixing parliamentary terms fall within section 6 of the Australia Acts 1986 (Cth) & (UK). The article concludes by examining recent amendments to the Electoral Act 1907 (WA) designed to enable fixed election dates in Western Australia without requiring a successful referendum.

In a recent article Andrew Lokan has suggested that the courts are faced with political choices as they deal with native title. The purpose of this paper is to consider the history of the recognition of Aboriginal customary rights to land in Australia, assess the extent to which policy and political issues have thus far been relevant in those developments and then to consider the extent to which such policy and political issues may be relevant in the future. Possible limitations upon the policies that might be considered by the courts are discussed. The discussion also affords an opportunity to look back over the development of the law of native title and to review how and why we have come to where we now are.

Hypertensive heart disease and hypertrophic cardiomyopathy both lead to left ventricular hypertrophy despite differing in aetiology. Elucidating the correct aetiology of the presenting hypertrophy can be a challenge for clinicians, especially in patients with overlapping risk factors. Furthermore, drugs typically used to combat hypertensive heart disease may be contraindicated for the treatment of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, making the correct diagnosis imperative. In this review, we discuss characteristics of both hypertensive heart disease and hypertrophic cardiomyopathy that may enable clinicians to discriminate the two as causes of left ventricular hypertrophy. We summarise the current literature, which is primarily focused on adult populations, containing discriminative techniques available via diagnostic modalities such as electrocardiography, echocardiography, and cardiac MRI, noting strategies yet to be applied in paediatric populations. Finally, we review pharmacotherapy strategies for each disease with regard to pathophysiology.

In most cases, the employment relationship is capable of withstanding some friction and doubts … It may be difficult or embarrassing for an employer to be required to re-employ a person the employer believed guilty of a wrongdoing. The requirement may cause inconvenience to the employer. … The problems will be of the employer’s own making. If the employer is of even average fair-mindedness, they are likely to prove short-lived.

We compute the class groups of full rank upper cluster algebras in terms of the exchange polynomials. This characterizes the UFDs among these algebras. Our results simultaneously generalize theorems of Garcia Elsener, Lampe, and Smertnig from 2019 and of Cao, Keller, and Qin from 2023. Furthermore, we show that every (upper) cluster algebra is a finite factorization domain.

George Williams poses a very topical question: is a republican tradition for Australia either possible or desirable? Simply by recognising republicanism as a tradition deeply rooted in the history of Western political thought, Williams helps to take us beyond the current officially sponsored nativist campaign to rid us of our “foreign” Queen. Republicanism is a complex phenomenon that first became manifest in the world of classical antiquity. The strength of Williams's article lies in the impulse to break free from the banal parochialism of the republic promoted by the Australian Republican Movement and a compliant media eager to service the perceived legitimation needs of the national government.

In the American constitutional tradition Williams finds a rich store of ideas about the role of an active citizenry in the creation and preservation of a free republican society. The idea of the republic in America did not begin or end with the removal of a “foreign” monarch. Republicanism inspired the transformation of American society after the overthrow of the British monarchy.

British business in the second half of the nineteenth century was characterised by the continued predominance of small private firms at a time when competing nations such as Germany and the United States were more commonly embracing large corporations. Alfred Chandler has contrasted personal capitalism in Britain with competitive managerial capitalism in America and attributes the alleged poor performance of British business and, through it, national rates of economic growth to the uncompetitive small family firm. Applying internalisation and transaction cost analysis he argues that such firms failed to achieve economies of scale and scope or to develop sophisticated administrative hierarchies managed by tiers of professional executives, features increasingly common in America by the end of the nineteenth century. An alternative tradition has used the economics of information and the networks paradigm to argue for the benefits of small-scale cooperative capitalism in both Britain and Japan.

The passing of the 1988-1989 third financial quarter will probably be viewed by the BHP Group with mixed emotions. On the one hand BHP was recently reported to be “on course for [a] record $1 bn profit” for this current financial year, having in the first nine months lifted its profits to $768 million, a 5.8 per cent increase on the $725.8 million for the equivalent period in the 1987–1988 financial year. On the other hand however it was in this third quarter that the High Court, at the expense of BHP, was given its first opportunity to consider s 46 of the Trade Practices Act 1974 (Cth) in Queensland Wire Industries Pty Ltd v Broken Hill Pty Ltd and Australian Wire Industries Pty Ltd. In a decision shedding some much needed light on the section, the Court unanimously held that BHP misused its substantial degree of power in the steel products market by refusing to supply Y-bar to Queensland Wire Industries Pty Ltd (QWI), albeit in continued adherence to its policy of committing that product to manufacturing processes within the BHP group.

The common law relating to the tort of passing off is the traditional means by which conduct threatening business reputation may be halted. During the past five years, the Federal Court of Australia has been called upon on many occasions to apply s 52 Trade Practices Act 1974 (Cth) to prevent such conduct. As yet, there has been no clear judicial statement as to the interrelationship and overlap between the two causes of action.

This Article discusses the scope of the two causes of action in the context of an allegation of actual or threatened erosion of goodwill. The types of cases in which such allegation is usually made is then examined and suggestions given as to which cause of action should be relied on.

Guardianship laws either for intellectually disadvantaged people alone, or for anyone with diminished functional capacity (such as victims of brain trauma), are now popular in Australia (other than in Western Australia and the Australian Capital Territory) and New Zealand. These laws are based on North American experience, particularly that of the Dependent Adults Act 1976 (Alberta). The common thread is that it permits a guardian to be appointed to manage the property or the personal affairs of the disadvantaged person, or to make one or more of the multitude of decisions lying within these two broad areas of human living.

Contemporary legislation is notable for three things. First, partial orders are permitted (in place of only plenary orders). Indeed they are positively encouraged where any intervention at all is called for (the normalisation principle). Secondly, personal guardianships have been revived (having existed all along under cumbersome equity jurisdictions of – or associated with – superior courts).

This article analyses arguments that the prerogative should be readily displaced by statute, where a statute deals with a subject matter similar to a prerogative. It does so by examining the leading cases on displacement of the prerogative in the United Kingdom and the Australian states, and displacement of the Australian Commonwealth's inherent executive power. The cases do not adopt a single rule but the question of whether a statute will be taken to displace a prerogative is highly dependent on the facts and the provisions of the particular statute. This article defends the current approach to displacement, for three reasons. First, the courts do not allow governments to subvert or ignore statutes by using the prerogative. Secondly, the courts have almost always decided in favour of liberty and against the conferral of coercive powers on government. Thirdly, a single rule could not do justice to all the variables involved in displacement cases. Ordinary principles of statutory interpretation are sufficient to deal with questions of displacement.

The early cases on the Australian territories approached them not as constituent parts of the Commonwealth, but as subordinate to it, with the result that the territories power, s 122 of the Constitution, was held to be unaffected by other constitutional provisions. Most strikingly, Ch III of the Constitution was wholly inapplicable to the courts and judicial proceedings of the territories. Even the important doctrine that Ch III is exhaustive of the judicial power of the Commonwealth did not restrict the Parliament’s power to confer appellate jurisdiction on the High Court under s 122.

In more recent cases, majorities of the High Court have adopted a more cohesive approach which considers s 122 in the context of the Commonwealth Constitution as a whole. The view that the territories are disjoined from the Commonwealth is no longer tenable, if it ever was.

This paper considers the guidance issue for attackers against aircraft with active defense in a two-on-two engagement, which includes an attacker, a protector, a defender and a target. A cooperative line-of-sight guidance scheme with prescribed performance and input saturation is proposed utilising the sliding mode control and line-of-sight guidance theories, which guarantees that the attacker is able to capture the target with the assistance of the protector remaining on the line-of-sight between the defender and the attacker in order to intercept the defender. A fixed-time prescribed performance function and first-order anti-saturation auxiliary variable are designed in the game guidance strategy to constrain the overshoot of the guidance variable and satisfy the requirement of an overload manoeuver. The proposed guidance strategy alleviates the influence of external disturbance by implementing a fixed-time observer and the chattering phenomenon caused by the sign function. Finally, nonlinear numerical simulations verify the cooperative guidance strategies.