Britain and Australia share so much history together; it would be disgraceful just to ditch them. If we were to become a republic, what will change? If that was to happen, only our head of state wouldn’t be a monarch but a president and we wouldn’t have a governor general. Now that’s not much, and there would be so many things affected from this. Maybe if we did become a republic, our national flag might change because of the Union Jack on the top-left hand corner.
This irregular feature of Congress has been exploited increasingly as both parties become more polarised. However, such an issue does not translate to Australian governments, as the presiding officers of both houses have the power to turn off the microphone of whoever holds the floor once their allocated time is finished. The tradition of party moderates crossing the floor to vote with the opposition is a long-held one in the US (Pfiffner 2002: 34). Despite a loss of bipartisan relations between
There many arguments for and against Britain having a codified constitution but one could say that they are too rigid for such a time of social change. Firstly, a codified constitution is limited government and would cut the government down to size. A codified would effectively end the principle of parliamentary sovereignty and subsequently elective dictatorship. Both of which were shown in Blair and Thatcher’s Governments. It would also prevent the government to interfere with the constitution unfairly, as it would be protected by the existence of the higher law and the ‘supermajority’.
Where large parts of it are written down, in the laws passed in Parliament - known as statute law and ‘The Doctrine Of Parliamentary Sovereignty’ all of which clearly outline the laws, principles and established precedents according to how the UK is governed. Furthermore, many think the UKs fragmented constitution leads to more flexibility in political matters and allows politicians to easily modernise and adapt outdated clauses. This view is often supported with negative examples from the USA’s codified constitutional system. Such as, the topical debate on amending US citizen’s constitutional right to bear arms amidst rising gun crime. The fact the amendment is codified makes it difficult for the US government to modify it even though it is outdated and highly detrimental to US society.
The Supreme Court holds the power of judicial review over both the executive and the legislature. The power of judicial review is the power of the judiciary to declare acts of Congress and the executive unconstitutional and therefore null and void. This therefore means that the Supreme Court can strike down bills. We saw this recently in 1998 with the Clinton v. New York City, it declared the Line Item Veto act unconstitutional. Therefore, we can see simply by the powers held by the Supreme Court that appointments have to be controversial, in order to ensure
The traditional view of the law making process is that parliament makes the law though acts of parliament, as they are democratically elected to make law, whereas judges aren’t so they merely apply it in court to the cases presented to them. However through judicial precedence and statutory interpretation judges are often seen to be making the law, which is shown in McLoughlin v O’Brian where this case introduced the principle of “secondary victims” to be able to succeed in nervous shock. Generally the courts operate a doctrine of precedence which makes every court bound by the decisions made by the courts above it in the hierarchy and courts will be bound by their own precedent decisions. This doctrine is where judges should follow similar decisions made in previous cases to maintain a degree of certainty within the legal system and is based on “stare decicis” which means to stand by what has been decided. However the practice statement allows the supreme court to change the law If they believe that an early case was wrongly decided, but
How do the government control delegated legislation? To delegate the law-making power to another body can be very risky if there is no control. Luckily the government has several methods for controlling that the delegated legislation is relevant and good. First we have The Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments, known as the Scrutiny Committee and it is made up of MPs and peers. It exists to look at each statutory instrument in detail to make sure that it falls within the boundaries set by the Parent Act and to refer provisions requiring further consideration to both Houses of Parliament.
On the other hand, the liberals, or Judicial Activists, believe that the founding fathers recognized that standards of their time wouldn’t apply to the future, so therefore left the constitution broadly based and available for contemporary interpretation. In my opinion, as in many others, Judicial Activism is just an excuse for justices to rule based on personal opinion. The judicial branch of the government needs to show judicial restraint because of the variety of the cases they receive. They need to make sure that the rulings they enact are rulings that follow the constitution and not their own personal beliefs as they have been doing for some time now. In my opinion, the most important example of judicial restraint being in need in American history occurred on May 20, 1940.
He thought that the government would be given too much power. His thoughts on the injustices in the Constitution greatly influenced the making of the Bill of Rights. At the time, Federalists argued that the Constitution didn’t need a bill of rights, due to the fact that the people and states kept any powers not given to the federal government, but Anti-Federalists said that a bill of rights was necessary to safeguard individual liberty. So when the Bill of Rights was made it listed prohibitions on governmental power and the rights that were granted to people. When the Bill of Rights was adopted into the Constitution it was became the fundamental rights of all citizens in 1791.
Commonwealth of Australia 1937, Aboriginal welfare, Initial conference of commonwealth and state Aboriginal affairs authorities, Government Printer, Canberra. Dobzhansky, T 1960, ‘Species after Darwin’, in A century of Darwin, ed S Barnett, Mercury, London, pp. 19-55. Griffiths T 1996, Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne. Hawkins, M 1998, Social Darwinism in European and American thought, 1860-1945; nature as model as nature as threat, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.