Elisa Arcioni

Environmental Justice in Australia: When the RATS Became IRATE

Environmental justice is a concept used in the United States to describe and analyse environmental politics. That concept also has application outside the country of its origin. In Australia the case study of a dispute between residents, industry and government in the town of Port Kembla provides an example of how environmental justice can be given specific meaning in a local context. Observations of the ‘politics’ of an environmental dispute are made.

Tracing the ethno-cultural or racial identity of the Australian constitutional people

ABSTRACT The constitutional identity of a ‘people’ is sometimes assumed to contain an ethno-cultural or racial element. In light of potential constitutional change in Australia to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, this article traces the extent to which the Australian constitutional ‘people’ have such an identity. Historically, those ‘people’ were assumed to be British and ‘white’. However, that assumption has not been incorporated into the constitutional jurisprudence of Australia. There remain some textual traces of a racial identity which can only be removed by referendum. Recent jurisprudence puts in doubt the ability of Parliament to exclude individuals from ‘the people’ on the basis of race for some purposes, but textual change is necessary to remove all remaining vestiges of a negative racial component of Australian constitutional identity.

Democracy and the Constitution: The People Deciding the Identity of ‘the people’

The phrase ‘the people’ appears at the beginning of the preamble to the Australian Constitution, where the people of the colonies are recognised as ‘the people’ who ‘agreed to unite in one indissoluble federal Commonwealth’. That agreement is a reference to the referenda held in each colony to accept the draft Constitution, which had been drafted by predominantly elected delegates to the constitutional conventions in the late 1890s.2 Those conventions resulted in a Constitution Bill which was taken to the United Kingdom by the Australian delegation and, with one significant alteration,3 was passed by the Imperial Parliament.

Identity at the Edge of the Constitutional Community

Constitutions often refer to ‘the people’ as well as governmental institutions and structures. ‘The people’ may play a constitutive role, as well as being constituted or defined by the constitution in question. Membership of ‘the people’ may confer rights and protections, as well as a constitutional ‘identity’. But how is the nature and composition of that group to be understood? This chapter tackles that question by providing a study into the constitutional identity of individuals at the edge of the Australian constitutional people – people who reside in Australian territories. An understanding of the constitutional margins, it will be argued, assists in drawing broader conclusions about how Australian constitutional law determines membership of the constitutional ‘people’. It also enables us to think about the conceptual links between public law and international law, as territories are often located outside the mainland nation. This analysis of the constitutional margins highlights how allegiance and cultural identification (race) are relevant to the determination of constitutional membership.

Developments in Free Speech Law in Australia: Coleman and Mulholland

This article provides an overview of the developments in 2004 regarding the constitutional freedom of political communication.1 This will be done through a discussion of the cases of Coleman v Power2 and Mulholland v Australian Electoral Commission.3 These two cases have confirmed the validity of the general propositions in Lange v Australian Broadcasting Corporation,4 regarding the existence of a freedom of political communication implied from the Australian Constitution, and provide the basis for some observations with respect to that implication. In this article an overview is given of the basic principles in Lange, followed by a detailed discussion of relevant