Space law is regulated largely by international treaties which have little to say regarding the use and regulation of commercial space. As the costs of access to outer space decrease and the benefits exponentially increase, more countries are seeking to support and encourage ‘NewSpace’ entrepreneurs in order to establish commercial space industries. Australia has been a minor player in the space domain, primarily through involvement with Europe and the US since the late 1960s, but its domestic legislation bears little relevance to the shape of space industry today. Australia’s neighbour, New Zealand, now wants to become a NewSpace incubator and has recently enacted legislation designed to make it a competitive host nation for launch providers. This article will compare the regulatory space regimes of these two countries to provide an assessment of the importance of domestic regulation in fostering competitive commercial space services, for countries seeking to become competitive in the commercial space race.

In an illuminating analysis of the concept of justiciability, Geoffrey Marshall distinguishes two senses of the term. In the first, descriptive sense, justiciable issues are issues which have, in fact, been committed by parliaments to a judicial forum. Any question which has been made subject to adjudication is, in the descriptive sense of the word, a justiciable question. In the second, prescriptive sense, justiciable issues are issues which are suitable to be resolved judicially. In the United Kingdom, there is no obstacle to Parliament requiring courts to resolve questions which are not suitable to be resolved judicially. By contrast, in terms of the Australian Constitution, the Chapter III courts are limited to answering questions which are justiciable in the prescriptive sense of the term.

In recent years there has been unprecedented concern about the impact of population change on Australian society. The concerns come from different quarters. Commentators have variously remarked that fertility is too low, immigration is too high, the population is ageing too rapidly, and that uneven spatial distribution is placing too great a burden on the infrastructure of already crowded cities. As further evidence of the growing interest in population dynamics, in 2010 the Australian Government created a new office of the Minister for Sustainable Population to help guide the development of policies to meet Australia’s future population needs.

These are important issues in a national population debate, yet demographic change also affects specific workforces in specific ways, and this has led to a new interest in workforce planning. This article examines how demographic change is likely to affect one aspect of the Australian judicial system in the future, namely, the cost of judges.

Sri Lanka has alternated between authoritarian politics and constitutional democracy over the past 70 years. For 25 years after independence, the country functioned as a constitutional democracy with regular elections and power alternating between the two main political parties. Since 1972, political elites have used constitution-making as a method of consolidating their hold on political power. In 2015, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution trimmed the powers of the President and provided for a balanced form of power-sharing between executive and legislature. It enhanced the independence of the courts and the fourth-branch institutions. However, these gains were reversed by the 20th Amendment, passed in 2020. Against the backdrop of an intense competition for political power and the manipulation of constitutions to retain power, this contribution discusses three recurring sites of constitutional struggle and debate in Sri Lanka: struggles over presidentialism, power-sharing and the place of Buddhism in the constitution. This paper contends that a return to constitutional democracy will require, at a minimum, a revisitation of the first two issues, even if the third — the place of Buddhism — remains untouched. The paper concludes by arguing that while all three constitutional struggles have a different historical trajectory and different dynamics, they are all part of a larger struggle — the struggle to transform Sri Lanka from a Buddhist-majoritarian state into a plural, multi-ethnic and multi-religious society in law and in practice.

Australia has a competition problem: there is not enough of it. Our industries are concentrated. Our markets show signs of weak competition. The way Australia’s courts, parliamentarians and regulators think about competition is partly to blame. Although it has been less influential in Australia than in the United States, the Chicago School’s views on competition have shaped our laws, policies and enforcement practices. The Chicago School views market concentration as a virtue more than a vice. The School contended that barriers to entry are negligible, market power is temporary, most mergers are good, vertical restraints and predatory pricing are either benign or efficient. The growing body of research and experience, however, shows that the Chicago School’s faith in the ability of markets to self-correct and deliver competitive outcomes was misplaced. There is a strong progressive case for repositioning how we think about competition. Focusing more on the competitive process, the structure of markets and the incentives those structures create for firms will play an important role in reducing inequality.

The relationship between courts and social change can be viewed from at least two perspectives. The first, frequently explored in the literature, invites consideration of how courts respond to social change, real or apparent. The second directs attention to whether the courts themselves can bring about social change.

The argument that led to the inclusion of s 116 of the Constitution, a provision that provides a limited guarantee of religious freedom in Australia, has not been properly understood. The standard account of the argument presented by the proponent of the clause, Henry Bournes Higgins, holds that it was included to ensure that no inferential power to legislate with respect to religion could be drawn from the religious words of the constitutional preamble. This article argues that the standard account of Higgins' argument is wrong and that the substance of Higgins' concern was a realisation that the Commonwealth's enumerated powers were wide enough to authorise legislation dealing with religion.

As the work of feminist legal scholars has convincingly demonstrated, gendered assumptions underpin much of our law, including areas such as tort, property, tax or company law, where women are not so readily apparent. As the field of law that most overtly involves women, and deals extensively with relationships between women and men, family law shares, perhaps only with the law of sexual assault, the high visibility of women as parties or participants. It is therefore particularly susceptible to a gender analysis. However, any such analysis must take place against the background of the Family Law Act 1975 (Cth), legislation written in a gender-neutral fashion, though it operates in the context of a highly gendered world with all its consequences.The purpose of this article is to suggest some of the ways in which gender might operate under the Family Law Act to disadvantage women.

In Forge v Australian Securities and Investments Commission the High Court considered whether the appointment of acting judges to a state Supreme Court was constitutionally permissible. By a majority of six to one, the Court found that such appointments were constitutionally valid. The decision is an important illustration of the way that the ‘Kable principle', which works to maintain the institutional integrity of Australia's integrated system of courts, continues to evolve in Australian constitutional law. This casenote examines how the judgments in Forge v ASIC extend the Kable principle to cover the composition and structure of state courts, and seek to link the Kable principle with the text of the Constitution.

The issue of the protection of privacy sums up a congeries of public anxieties about the standing of individuals in relation to those who exercise governmental and economic power. The issue has impinged increasingly on governmental and legal processes but it is one which these processes have had difficulty assimilating. At a general level, this article attempts to provide some insights into this difficulty, taking the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) as its main focus.

Until now, analyses of the Privacy Act have tended to concentrate quite narrowly upon its provisions. Although a number of shortcomings have been identified as a consequence, no detailed or systematic explanations for these shortcomings have been advanced. This article seeks both to outline the deficiencies in the Act and to explain them. It takes as its point of departure the premise that the Act's deficiencies cannot be explained adequately by looking only at its provisions or formal legislative history.

We live in times of escalating activity of investigative tribunals uncovering corruption, crime, discrimination and violations of public service discipline. Investigation by agencies of the executive branch of government has become an industry, a form of regulation and policy-making which ranges well beyond the occasional royal commission. This has been matched by an escalating concern of civil libertarians and courts regarding the damage which investigative tribunals may do to those who are investigated or named in their proceedings. There is a question whether the expressed concern of the courts, the protection of reputation, is warranted in the light of the accountability of such tribunals by means of judicial review. The degree to which investigative tribunals cause damage to individuals in a manner which infringes their fundamental rights is constantly a matter of controversy. The degree of success achieved by the tribunals in pursuing their statutory objectives is also often a matter of controversy.

This article considers how the use of referenda to enact constitutional change relates to the concept of a ‘constitution outside the courts’. It argues that the referendum is a challenge to this concept but that these challenges arise in a more complex manner than might first be assumed. First, a referendum occurs within a legal framework which calls into question the notion of the referendum as an extra-legal interruption to the constitutional order. Secondly, this suggests that the referendum is more likely to be the end point of a process of constitutional change rather than the vehicle or impetus for it. This means that the relevant developments may occur elsewhere in society. Using Ireland as a case study, the article argues that there is a constitution outside the courts which depends to a significant extent on the mediating influence of multiple actors—including the courts.

Technological developments, particularly the advent of the Internet and the mobile phone, have spawned a vast increase in the volume, type and availability of telecommunications information. Mobile phones are now capable of sending and receiving SMS text messages and emails, accessing and downloading material from the Internet, taking photographs, streaming video and audio content and providing GPS navigation. National security and law enforcement agencies frequently wish to access telecommunications information for national security and law enforcement purposes. The desired information may be ‘telecommunications content’ — that is, the actual substance of a communication — or ‘telecommunications data’ — meaning information about a communication but not the substance of it.

This article explores the concept of “fundamental law” as it relates to the Australian legal system. Concentrating in particular on constitutional law and the special place in that body of law of the doctrines relating to amendment of the Federal and State constitutions, Dr Lumb examines the source of the power to amend the constitution, the limitations on that power and the aspects of our legal system which may be beyond the power to amend. It attempts to discover those elements of our constitutional systems which are so fundamental that they may not be materially altered by any form or process of constitutional alteration.

In recent years, scholars worldwide have begun organising and developing a coherent framework and research agenda focused on the emerging field of ‘global administrative law’. This nascent body of law, unlike domestic or national forms of administrative law, does not operate within the bounds of unitary nation states, and unlike traditional accounts of public international law, it does not arise exclusively between nation states. Instead it operates in a transnational or global space occupied by a vast variety of administrative actors responsible for trans-governmental regulation and administration; the field of ‘global governance’. To combat growing concerns that there are crucial legitimacy, accountability and democratic deficiencies inherent in this system of global governance, numerous administrative law type mechanisms and principles have been developed by global administrative bodies. Global administrative law embodies the totality of these various mechanisms and principles.

A key objective of Australia's recent national water reforms is to keep water licence and entitlement holders accountable for the amounts of water they extract, trade and use. Water metering and the recording and reporting of water extraction and trading data are processes designed to ensure this accountability, and are central to Australia's water accounting regimes. Yet much of the data necessary to ensure compliance with water licences and access entitlements is not publicly available in Australia. This absence of publicly accessible information is due to a lack of rigour and transparency in statutory water accounting regimes. There are also restrictions imposed by water legislation and the laws of privacy and confidentiality that prevent public access to water accounting data, except in aggregated form. Consequently, commercial and industrial water consumers in Australia are not kept accountable for their consumptive water use and water market objectives are unfulfilled, contrary to the express provisions of the Intergovernmental Agreement on a National Water Initiative (‘NWI’). This article argues that statutory and policy frameworks for water accounting in most Australian jurisdictions fail to meet the NWI objectives for national water accounting. In response, it advocates legislative reforms that would facilitate the achievement of these objectives.

In a series of judgments in August and October 2004, the High Court found that the Migration Act 1958 (Cth) (‘the Act’) unambiguously provides for the indefinite detention of unlawful non-citizens, and that such a law is constitutionally valid. In doing so, a majority on the High Court arguably rewrote the rule book on the operation of Chapter III of the Constitution (‘Ch III’), undermining the majority judgment in Chu Kheng Lim v Minister for Immigration in the process.

This case note focuses primarily on Al-Kateb v Godwin. To the extent that they clarify or expand on the reasoning with respect to the operation of Ch III, reference is also made to Minister for Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs v Al Khafaji and Behrooz v Secretary of the Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs which were argued at the same time as Al-Kateb, and to Re Woolley; Ex parte Applicants M276/2003 by their next friend GS, which concerned the administrative detention of non-citizen children.

The central purpose of this article is to test the assumption that constitutional cases generally produce a heightened level of disagreement amongst the members of the High Court. In addition to extra-judicial statements indicating that is so, there are a number of theoretical and pragmatic reasons why we would expect greater individuality in the delivery of constitutional judgments than might be observed in other areas. However, there has not been an empirical study of the Court’s behaviour in these cases which is of sufficient longitudinal scope so as to verify this suspicion, no matter how compelling the arguments or anecdotal impressions.

This study attempts to overcome that deficiency. In order to do so, it adopts the following structure. In Part II, the hypothesis under examination will be stated with consideration of the reasons currently given for its acceptance. In Part III, the methodology employed to test the hypothesis will be set out. In Part IV, results of the study will be presented with accompanying analysis. In the concluding Part, the findings of the study will be summed up and possible directions for future research will be suggested.