The battles over official secrecy have to be fought on many different fronts. In the United Kingdom—whose ministers and public servants allegedly have a “passion for secrecy”—this was more than usually evident during 1967. Two pieces of legislation—namely, the Parliamentary Commissioner Act, 1967 (U.K.) and the Public Records Act, 1967 (Eng.)—represented a modest triumph for those who would wish to see more light shed upon the affairs of the nation. Elsewhere the picture was rather more familiar. The Security Commission recommended a further tightening of documentary security in the Cabinet Office; this followed upon the conviction under the Official Secrets Acts, 1911 to 1939 (U.K.) of a young typist in the Cabinet Office, “the first known occasion on which classified papers have been extracted from” this inner sanctum of government.

The previous Australian government's aim was to remove the hereditary office of the monarch with only minor changes to the Australian system of government. Former Prime Minister Paul Keating stated that the proposed “republican” changes would have limited implications for the design and operation of Australian democracy. But his quest, and the quest of those who support the republican movement, may represent a more momentous shift in Australian political values and political sensibility than is widely admitted. This shift might lead to the enhancement of democratic participation. Indeed, the debate surrounding the republican initiative has already caused both a revised understanding of Australian political philosophy and a renewed appreciation of certain strong democratic threads in the history of Australia as a nation.

Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation or SLAPPs are abusive lawsuits which have the purpose or effect of suppressing public participation. This Article considers the peculiarities of this form of “strategic litigation” and takes stock of developments in the European Union to combat SLAPPs, noting that while the adoption of an Anti-SLAPP Directive represents an example of effective legal mobilization and a major positive step towards safeguarding the rule of law in the EU, its limitations render it crucial that Member States treat the Directive as a foundation and build national legislation which is more robust in substance and more far-reaching in scope.

Mr Partlett is concerned to review the theoretical and practical place of government programs which positively discriminate in favour of groups on racial lines. He reviews the justification of this benign discrimination in relation to the notion of equality. He finds that the justification of benign discrimination depends upon its social realities. With reference to recent United States constitutional law developments he concludes that programs of benign discrimination must be closely justified to ensure that they do not trespass on certain fundamental rights and freedoms of the individual.

Australian government initiatives are then reviewed together with an appraisal of their legal standing under the various pieces of anti-discrimination legislation in Australia.

The author attempts to synthesise out of this discussion a strategy under which benign programs may be encouraged for the promotion of equality for aborigines, while at the same time the individual human rights of others are protected.

This study investigates the reflections on the trio of exchange rate, nominal interest rate and inflation, on Turkey’s Real Gross Domestic Product (RGDP). In the analysis using annual time series data covering the years 1985–2020 obtained from the Turkish Statistical Institute, the Vector Autoregression (VAR) and Nonlinear Autoregressive Distribution Lag (NARDL) models are used with restricted variables. The existence of cointegration also encourages the application of the Vector Error Correction (VECM) model to examine the causal relationships between these variables. Nonlinear ARDL test results and other tests reveal some long-term effects. Research results show that inflation-based growth does not occur in the short term and negatively affects growth in the long term. Due to Turkey’s significant current account deficit and heavy reliance on imported energy and inputs, currency devaluation is ineffective in boosting exports, highlighting the challenges of promoting export growth under these economic conditions. Moreover, it turns out that policies that reduce interest rates, as well as the depreciation of the Turkish lira against the exchange rate due to inflation, harm the economy in general. These effects serve as a crucial wake-up call for proponents of the export-led growth model.

In commencing his sprawling collective portrait of 19th century Britain a few years ago, A N Wilson stated simply, ‘[t]he Victorians are still with us.’ The truth of this, he went on to explain, lay in the fact that, though much changed, the world which they created persists. Although we seem to be at a great remove from the concerns, innovations and ideals of that era, Wilson ably demonstrated that the world left to us by the Victorians was immutably different from that which existed beforehand. As such it marked a break with the past and set in place the parameters within which the modern age has continued to develop.

This note will look at the litigation that arose in the lead-up to World Youth Day held in Sydney in July 2008. In Part II, the events that gave rise to Evans v New South Wales will be outlined and the reasons of the Full Court of the Federal Court for its decision briefly explained. The consequences of the Court applying the principle of legality in Evans — which lay at the heart of its reasoning and decision — will be explored in Part III. First, I will consider how it impacted upon the argument made by the applicants that the relevant legislation was invalid for infringing the implied freedom of political communication guaranteed by the Australian Constitution. And second, I will discuss whether the decision in Evans highlights a lacuna in the legal protection of freedom of expression in Australia — as some commentators have suggested — and whether a statutory charter of rights would remedy this. And finally, in Part IV, I will make some observations about the principle of legality and the judicial protection of rights more generally. Taken together, these observations lead me to conclude that the judicial role in the protection of rights in Australia may be best served through the application of the principle of legality rather than an interpretive obligation under a statutory charter of rights.

If it is in any sense true that the establishment of the federal arbitration system created “a new province for law and order” as Higgins asserted, then it is certainly true that the concept of the basic wage as a foundational element in all awards of that system made in settlement of interstate industrial disputes became the single most important factor in the development of that law and of that order. From the Harvester judgment of 1907 emerged the structure of:

1. (i) a basic wage common to all workers irrespective of the work upon which, or the industry in which, they were employed and

2. (ii) a secondary wage or margin for the skill, responsibility, or particular circumstances of the work, or industry, in question

which was the distinguishing feature of wage determination in Australia for the next sixty years. All federal and State industrial tribunals operated with in this structural framework, either by legislative direction, or as a result of their own deliberate decisions based upon a common acceptance of this structure by the parties coming before these tribunals.

Although the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (hereafter referred to as the AAT) does not enjoy an express power to review policy considerations taken into account in reaching a decision under review, such a power has been taken to have been impliedly conferred by s 43 of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal Act 1975 (Cth) (hereafter referred to as the AAT Act).

Section 43(1) empowers the Trjbunal to exercise all the powers and discretions conferred on the decision-maker whose decision is subject to review. It empowers the Tribunal to affirm, vary or set aside the decision under review, and to make a decision in substitution for the decision so set aside or to remit the matter for reconsideration in accordance with any directions or recommendations of the Tribunal. Section 43(6) provides that the decision made by the AAT in substitution for the decision made by the original decision-maker shall be deemed to be a decision of the original decision-maker.

Only a few years ago, the future of tax policy seemed clear to all. The rhetoric, and to some extent the reality, of tax policy were dominated by the image of “levelling the playing field”, and the much-touted phenomenon of “globalisation” was taken to mean that the field was likely to be levelled somewhere close to a common denominator. Governments were no longer growing, the “welfare state” was increasingly seen as obsolete, and only the occasional out-of-touch crank seemed at all concerned about the redistributive consequences of reducing taxes on wealth and high incomes.

There has recently been a minor research and publishing boom in the field of refusals of royal assent to Bills in Australia. When in the throes of finalising my own contribution to this outburst of scholarship, I discovered that the figurehead German Federal President had just refused his assent to two government Bills passed by the Bundestag (the lower house of Parliament). In the two cases, which occurred in October and December 2006, the Federal President acted because he thought the proposed statute unconstitutional. Further research revealed that these were the seventh and eighth refusals of assent by a Federal President against the government's wishes since the foundation of the Federal Republic in 1949. As a result, there is a long-running academic debate in Germany about the circumstances in which the figurehead Federal President may refuse assent. Some scholars even permit the Federal President to assess every proposed law to ensure that it complies with the constitutional charter of rights, while others take a more restrictive view and confine his task to errors of parliamentary procedure and/or restrictions on law-making power other than those to be found in the charter of rights.

Agitation for parenting reform has become a prominent feature of family law policy debates in recent years. Many countries, such as England and Canada, have proceeded cautiously in response to such demands. Australia, on the other hand, opted for a bolder step and enacted a suite of shared parenting amendments in 2006, including a presumption of ‘equal shared parental responsibility'. The Shared Parental Responsibility Act was designed to facilitate substantial, if not equal, involvement by both parents in children's lives following separation, provided this is safe. While conversations about the implications of this move continue to take place, the first empirical evidence of its impact on post-separation parenting patterns has now been published. Its data suggest the reforms have been successful in producing an increase in ‘substantially shared care arrangements’ since the legislation came into force. At the same time, however, the research indicates that a significant number of these arrangements are characterised by intense parental conflict, and that shared care of children is a key variable affecting poor emotional outcomes for children.

On 10 April 2005 Justice Bradley Selway died. He was 50. For those who knew and worked with Brad, as he was universally known, this was crushing news. Like many I came across Brad through a shared interest in public law, an area in which he excelled, and like many a professional interaction it turned into a cherished friendship.

My first meeting with Brad was when he agreed to chair a continuing legal education seminar in Adelaide on section 90 of the Constitution. As an inexperienced academic I was nervous and clearly portrayed that lack of confidence. He, as was his way, calmed the situation by reminding all that he should be the nervous one having just lost the States $5 billion with the High Court’s decision in Ha v New South Wales.

Year by eventful year, a century has passed since the birth of Edward Aloysius McTiernan on 16 February 1892 at Glen Innes, New South Wales. The second of two children of Patrick McTiernan, police constable, and Isabella McTiernan (nee Diamond) came into a world on the brink of great political and legal changes. His life virtually spanned the whole history to date of the Commonwealth of Australia. It saw mighty wars, great scientific and social changes and the apogee and fall of the British Empire. Instructive it is to reflect upon the world he entered and the controversies which were agitating Australia and the mother country at a time young Edward was born.

A year before his birth, an event was to take place which affected the course of his life. In 1890, provision was first made for the payment of members of Parliament elected at the next general election in the colony of New South Wales.

Paleoproterozoic granitoids of the lesser Himalayan belt are keys to understanding the evolution of the northern Indian continental margin and its position in the Columbia supercontinent assembly. We present whole-rock chemistry and zircon U-Pb geochronological data for Gwaldam Biotite Granite (GBGr) from the Baijnath Klippe (BK) in Kumaun Himalaya to elucidate their petrogenesis and geodynamic implications. Granites are characterized by ferroan, weakly peraluminous nature with high SiO2 and K2O contents, enrichment in LILE (Rb, Th, K and Pb), and depletion in Ba, Nb, P, Hf and Ti. Granites show enrichment in light rare earth element relative to heavy rare earth elements and pronounced negative Eu anomalies. Such chemistry suggests typical A-type granite with high Y/Nb >2 values that characterize it as A2-type granite. Zircon U-Pb ages for the granite yield upper intercept at 1900 ± 3 Ma (core) and 1854 ± 2 Ma (rim). Integrating the chemical and geochronological data, we propose a two-stage evolution model for the area. In the GBGr, the ∼1900 Ma date of zircon core is likely the date of crystallization of the melts presumably formed during the first extensional stage at uppermost mantle – lower crust levels caused by slab break-off/rollback, which followed a post-collisional setting. The second incipient rifting stage produced melt that entrained the zircon cores (∼1900 Ma) during its ascendance and crystallized as the GBGr at ∼1854 Ma when the zircon rims crystallized. It is further proposed that the Paleoproterozoic Northern Indian continental margin later underwent at least two crustal extensions during the Columbia supercontinent agglomeration.