In 1971, FA Trindade argued that the doctrine of extraterritorial legislative incompetence (hereafter the doctrine of extraterritoriality) no longer applied to Australian State Parliaments. His general thesis was that the doctrine no longer applied, either because it had virtually ceased to exist at common law after the Privy Council decision in Croft v Dunphy in 1933, or because the doctrine had been impliedly repealed so far as the States were concerned by s 5 of the Colonial Laws Validity Act 1865 (UK) (CLVA). Since 1971, the High Court of Australia has had occasion to consider the extraterritoriality rule several times, and now the topic has received express legislative provision in the Australian Commonwealth and United Kingdom statutes that are collectively known as the Australia Acts 1986. The overall purpose of these statutes is to eliminate any residual legislative, executive, or judicial authority of the United Kingdom over Australia and its States. Part of this legislative plan involves the extraterritoriality doctrine as it applied to the Australian States. It is the aim of this article to examine the impact of the Australia Acts upon the extraterritoriality principle.

The abolition of all appeals from the High Court to the Privy Council, coupled with the High Court’s recent statement that it no longer regards itself as bound by Privy Council decisions, highlights the fact that appeals still lie, in many matters of State jurisdiction, from State Supreme Courts direct to the Privy Council. In this article, Mr Gilbert is primarily concerned to examine the extent to which section 106 of the Commonwealth Constitution may provide protection for these “direct” appeals. To this end, Mr Gilbert examines what case-law exists on section 106, and attempts to place the section in perspective in relation to the rest of the Constitution. The difficult (and largely unexplored) relationship between section 106 and section 51 is considered, to discover the possible reaches of Commonwealth legislative power with respect to the subject-matter protected by section 106. The position of “direct” appeals within the States’ constitutional structures is looked at, in order to determine the possible ambit of whatever protection is offered by section 106, and finally, Mr Gilbert analyses the recent comments by Mr lustice Murphy that the abolition of Privy Council appeals from the High Court has meant the consequential demise of “direct” appeals from State courts.

Gyps vulture populations across the Indian subcontinent collapsed in the 1990s and continue to decline. Repeated population surveys showed that the rate of decline was so rapid that elevated mortality of adult birds must be a key demographic mechanism. Post mortem examination showed that the majority of dead vultures had visceral gout, due to kidney damage. The realisation that diclofenac, a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug potentially nephrotoxic to birds, had become a widely used veterinary medicine led to the identification of diclofenac poisoning as the cause of the decline. Surveys of diclofenac contamination of domestic ungulate carcasses, combined with vulture population modelling, show that the level of contamination is sufficient for it to be the sole cause of the decline. Testing on vultures of meloxicam, an alternative NSAID for livestock treatment, showed that it did not harm them at concentrations likely to be encountered by wild birds and would be a safe replacement for diclofenac. The manufacture of diclofenac for veterinary use has been banned, but its sale has not. Consequently, it may be some years before diclofenac is removed from the vultures' food supply. In the meantime, captive populations of three vulture species have been established to provide sources of birds for future reintroduction programmes.