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Human rights in Australia have largely been developed by the democratically elected Australian Parliament through laws in specific contexts (rather than a stand-alone, abstract bill of rights) and safeguarded by such institutions as the independent judiciary and the High Court, which implement common law, the Australian Constitution, and various other laws of Australia and its states and ...
Nonetheless, these have been fundamental features of Australian constitutional practice from the start. [18] More recently, the principle of responsible government was reinforced by the High Court of Australia which upheld orders for a Minister of the government to table documents in the NSW Legislative Council after he refused to do so. [19]
The Constitution of Australia (also known as the Commonwealth Constitution) is the fundamental law that governs the political structure of Australia. It is a written constitution , that establishes the country as a federation under a constitutional monarchy governed with a parliamentary system .
Australia is the only democratic country in the world to not have a Bill of Rights (or similar protections). [3] In order to go some way toward addressing this, in 2005 the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) undertook steps to implement the Human Rights Act 2004 to formally protect de facto freedom, respect, equality and dignity in the ...
The Principle of Legality is an important legal doctrine in Australian public law. [1] It is an interpretive presumption by the judiciary that Australia's various parliaments do not intend to curtail or abrogate fundamental rights and freedoms when enacting legislation. Due to this, parliaments are effectively required to enact legislation ...
During the Lochner era, the right to freedom of contract was considered fundamental, and thus restrictions on that right were subject to strict scrutiny. Following the 1937 Supreme Court decision in West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish , though, the right to contract became considerably less important in the context of substantive due process and ...
The Constitutional history of Australia is the history of Australia's foundational legal principles. Australia's legal origins as a nation state began in the colonial era, with the reception of English law and the lack of any regard to existing Indigenous legal structures.
Prior to colonisation, the only systems of law to exist in Australia were the varied systems of customary law belonging to Indigenous Australians. Indigenous systems of law were deliberately ignored by the colonial legal system, and in the post-colonial era have only been recognised as legally important by Australian courts to a limited degree. [5]