In an examination of the Commonwealth Government's power to enact social welfare legislation, Professor Sackville explores the tendency toward federal control of this field since 1901 and the judicial reaction to it. His conclusion is that although certain of the restrictions imposed upon Commonwealth freedom of action by the High Court have been removed by constitutional amendment, the trend towards a wider concept of Commonwealth involvement in community welfare schemes may well exceed the present limits upon Commonwealth legislative competence; and he looks to the Constitutional Convention now in progress as the possible prelude to an era in which extension of these limits might more readily take place.

The object of this article is not to discuss in detail any of the questions of law which have arisen under the Matrimonial Causes Act 1959 (Cth), but merely to review in a fairly general way the manner in which the Act has operated since it came into force in February, 1961. My remarks will necessarily be confined, in the main, to experience in New South Wales since that is the State in which I have seen the Act operating but presumably the experience of Judges and practitioners in this State will not be greatly dissimilar from that of their opposite numbers in the other States of the Commonwealth. In one respect, however, the position of legal practitioners in this State is unique for New South Wales alone of the States still clings obstinately to the pre-Judicature Acts method of pleading.

Endozoochory, the dispersal of seeds through the animal gut passage, plays a significant role in vegetation dynamics. The success of endozoochorous seed dispersal depends on each stage of the process: ingestion by animals, gut passage, and post-dispersal events after defecation. After the deposition of seeds through feces, the effects of feces on the initial stages of seedling establishment, including seed germination and seedling growth, can significantly impact overall survival. The pattern of fecal effects on plant species depends on the animal species. In this study, we investigated the effects of feces presence on seed germination and early seedling growth using feces of the Korean water deer (Hydropotes inermis argyropus). We conducted a germination experiment on 12 plant species belonging to 10 plant families, which are known to germinate in the feces of Korean water deer. The study compared the seed germination rate and seedling length after germination between seeds sown with and without feces of the Korean water deer. In general, we found that the presence of deer feces per se had no significant effects on seed germination and early growth stages. However, additional research on post-dispersal events such as long-term growth, fecal type, and germination conditions is needed to fully understand the costs and benefits of endozoochory.

Researchers regularly use large survey studies to examine public political opinion. Surveys running over days and months will necessarily incorporate religious occasions that can introduce variation in public opinion. Using recent survey data from Israel, this study demonstrates that giving surveys on religious occasions (e.g., the Sabbath, Hannukah, Sukkot) can elicit different opinion responses. These effects are found among both religious and non-religious respondents. While incorporating these fluctuations is realistic in longer-term surveys, surveys fielded in a short window inadvertently drawing heavily on a holiday or holy day sample may bias their findings. This study thus urges researchers to be cognizant of ambient religious context when conducting survey studies.

Thomas Reed Powell once commented that it is just as well that‘ the law is full of collateral doctrines and devices that keep it from behaving as badly as it sometimes talks ’. Few areas of the law provide a better example of his point than does that frequently neglected area of constitutional law which is concerned with the legal character of acts performed under an unconstitutional statute. The traditional doctrine is that such a statute is an utter nullity. Perhaps the most famous statement of this doctrine is to be found in Norton v. Shelby County where Field J. stated that an unconstitutional statute ‘confers no rights; it imposes no duties; it affords no protection; it creates no office; it is in legal contemplation, as inoperative as though it had never been passed’. Or as a Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia once put it: ‘A pretended law made in excess of power is not and never has been a law at all . . . it is invalid ab initio’.

The recent High Court decision of XYZ v Commonwealth (‘XYZ’) has strengthened the aura of uncertainty surrounding the concept of ‘international concern’ and its role in widening the application of s 51(xxix) of the Commonwealth Constitution. This article considers the XYZ decision in light of past judicial exegesis and addresses what may lie ahead for this aspect of the external affairs power.

‘International concern’ has, for some years, hovered as a possible basis for the subject matter of legislation to attract the Commonwealth external affairs power, alongside other grounds such as the implementation of an international convention or recommendation, geographical externality, relations with other countries or customary international law. The head of power relies upon such grounds to colour a piece of Commonwealth legislation with the hue of ‘external affairs'. This ‘colouring’ therefore enables a subject matter to be within the Commonwealth Parliament's legislative competence.

I have had an interest in inquisitorial procedures and a lack of conviction to the often claimed superiority of adversarial procedures as long as I have have any interest in the law. Until recently however I found it difficult to engage other Australian lawyers in discussions which questioned whether the adversarias system is necessarily the best. It seems that my experience reflected the strength of the “Anglo-American legal culture”.

The decision of the Court of Appeal of New South Wales in Government Insurance Office of New South Wales v Glasscock demonstrates both th traditional view that a trial should be adversarial and a more open approach to the question. One submission of counsel for the appellant was that the trial hal miscarried because of the extent of judicial intervention, which was summed u by saying that the adversarial basis of the trial had been lost as a result of the judge's intervention.

Justifying judicial review of legislatures and executives in western democracies has become a controversial business. Those aspects of rule of law theory which appear to justify judicial review are attacked as undemocratic, in that they tend to replace the will of the people with the will of the judiciary. Where review is based on a set of constitutionally entrenched rights, those rights themselves are regarded as undemocratic; even supporters of rights-based judicial review have tended to concede that the rights, however desirable in some ways, are restrictions on democratic processes, rather than essential parts of democratic constitutional institutions. This seems unnecessarily defeatist. This article seeks to defend judicial review of executive action and of parliamentary legislation, on the basis of a conception of democracy which embodies certain rights rather than being in a state of tension with them.

The argument will take the following shape. A sketch of some relevant democratic considerations in Section 1 will conclude with a description of the model of democracy which will form the basis for the remainder of the argument Section 2 will argue that the function of law in providing powers for governments to use entails legal enforcement of the limits of those powers.

With wide-field phased array feed technology, the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) is ideally suited to search for seemingly rare radio transient sources that are difficult to discover previous-generation narrow-field telescopes. The Commensal Real-time ASKAP Fast Transient (CRAFT) Survey Science Project has developed instrumentation to continuously search for fast radio transients (duration ≲ 1 second) with ASKAP, with a particular focus on finding and localising Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs). Since 2018, the CRAFT survey has been searching for FRBs and other fast transients by incoherently adding the intensities received by individual ASKAP antennas, and then correcting for the impact of frequency dispersion on these short-duration signals in the resultant incoherent sum (ICS) in real-time. This low-latency detection enables the triggering of voltage buffers, which facilitates the localisation of the transient source and the study of spectro-polarimetric properties at high time resolution. Here we report the sample of 43 FRBs discovered in this CRAFT/ICS survey to date. This includes 22 FRBs that had not previously been reported: 16 FRBs localised by ASKAP to. ≲ 1 arcsec and 6 FRBs localised to ∼ 10 arcmin. Of the new arcsecond-localised FRBs, we have identified and characterised host galaxies (and measured redshifts) for 11. The median of all 30 measured host redshifts from the survey to date is z = 0.23. We summarise results from the searches, in particular those contributing to our understanding of the burst progenitors and emission mechanisms, and on the use of bursts as probes of intervening media. We conclude by foreshadowing future FRB surveys with ASKAP using a coherent detection system that is currently being commissioned. This will increase the burst detection rate by a factor of approximately ten and also the distance to which ASKAP can localise FRBs.

Administrative law — Administrative Appeals Tribunal — Function of Tribunal in relation to ministerial policy — Application of ministerial policy — Administrative Appeals Tribunal Act 1975 (Cth)

In Ghaidan v Mendoza, the English Court of Appeal held that s 3 of the Human Rights Act 1998 (UK) c 42 required that a previously enacted UK statute be interpreted so as to preclude express or implied discrimination against same-sex couples, consistently with art 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The Court considered that s 2(2) of the Rent Act 1977 (UK) c 42, which referred to a person living with the original tenant ‘as his or her wife or husband’, should not be read to exclude same-sex couples. Buxton LJ stated that the principle of deference to the will of Parliament did not assist in deciding the case. Section 2(2) was interpreted as applying to a person living with a tenant ‘as if they were his or her wife or husband’, despite the fact that the UK Parliament intended it to be restricted to partners of the opposite sex.