Australia's Constitution after Whitlam (Cambridge Studies in Constitutional Law)
Cambridge University Press, 3/11/2017
EAN 9781107119468, ISBN10: 1107119464
Hardcover, 300 pages, 23.5 x 15.6 x 1.9 cm
Language: English
Australia's constitutional crisis of 1975 was not simply about the precise powers of the Senate or the Governor-General. It was about competing accounts of how to legitimate informal constitutional change. For Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, and the parliamentary tradition that he invoked, national elections sufficiently legitimated even the most constitutionally transformative of his goals. For his opponents, and a more complex tradition of popular sovereignty, more decisive evidence was required of the consent of the people themselves. This book traces the emergence of this fundamental constitutional debate and chronicles its subsequent iterations in sometimes surprising institutional configurations: the politics of judicial appointment in the Murphy Affair; the evolution of judicial review in the Mason Court; and the difficulties Australian republicanism faced in the Howard Referendum. Though the patterns of institutional engagement have varied, the persistent question of how to legitimate informal constitutional change continues to shape Australia's constitution after Whitlam.
Part 1. Introduction
I. New questions
II. The plan
Part 2. Informal Constitutional Change
I. The possibility of informal change
II. The identification of informal change
III. The legitimacy of informal change
Part 3. The Whitlam Dismissal
I. The standard narrative
II. The dismissal and the constitutional canon
III. The higher law narrative
IV. Conclusion
Part 4. The Murphy Affair
I. Events of 1975–86
II. Murphy and the standard narrative
III. Murphy and the higher law narrative
IV. Conclusion
Part 5. The Mason Court
I. Internal point of view
II. Dixon's orthodoxy
III. Popular sovereignty foreshadowed
1962–86
IV. Popular sovereignty ascendant
1987–95
V. Parliamentary supremacy returns
1996–
VI. Conclusion
Part 6. The Howard Referendum
I. Constitutional law and identity
II. Whitlam and Republicanism
III. Republicanism reinvented
IV. Clash of grammars
V. Conclusion
Part 7. Conclusion.