Nicholas Aroney, University of Queensland TC Beirne School of Law, has posted
The Design of Australian Federalism, from
The Oxford Handbook of the Australian Constitution (Oxford University Press, 2018), edited by Cheryl Saunders and Adrienne Stone:
This chapter, published in The Oxford Handbook of the Australian Constitution (Oxford University Press, 2018), edited by Cheryl Saunders and Adrienne Stone, examines the design of Australia's federal system. Two historical propositions affirmed in the preamble to the constitution are central to this idea. These are, firstly, that the constitution was predicated on an agreement between the people of the Australian colonies and, secondly, that the intention was to unite the colonies into an indissoluble federal commonwealth. The Australian constitution does not rest upon the consent of an already consolidated people; nor does it create a unitary state. It is the result of an agreement among several mutually independent political communities and it establishes a federal system of government that preserves their continuing existence as self-governing polities. This chapter explains how these central ideas are embodied in the distribution of powers, system of representation, and processes of alteration and amendment established by the constitution.
--Dan Ernst
