The Australian Federal Constitution

31/1/2003:

• The www.australianpubliclaw.com site appears to be having problems. All material on it has vanished. Links disabled.
• The ACT Attorney-General's website appears to be down. One link disabled.
• The Samuel Griffith Society has rearranged its website, breaking most of its links in the process. Links fixed.
• A couple of the Constitutional Centenary Society site links have become broken and were unable to be fixed using CCS's site (which simply gives an error), so I have used one of the National Library's pandora server images of the CCS site instead.
• A couple of DFAT factsheets have either vanished or been reduced to rather useless skeletons. Links disabled.
• The House of Representatives website has renamed its factsheets "infosheets", converted them to PDF files, put the "infosheets" in a different place, then made it impossible to access the "factsheets". (Sigh!) Links updated.
• The AEC and the Federal Attorney-General's Dept. have rearranged their websites, the Tasmanian parliamentary library site has rearranged its factsheets, and the Centenary of Australia site has vanished from the Net (but can still be accessed via the archive on the NLA's Pandora). Assorted links fixed (and a few deleted).
• The Discovering Democracy site has rearranged its Ask an Expert pages. Three links fixed.
• The Judicial Conference of Australia website has moved. Links fixed.
• Various other broken links fixed.
• A couple of blunders of my own fixed.
• Added links to numerous papers from the Federal Parliamentary Library's site, from the more recent volumes of the Samuel Griffith Society, and more of the historical texts at Sydney Uni. Library's Australian Federation Full Text Database site.
• Added links to a number of papers in AustLII's online archives of the Alternative Law Journal, the Australian Indigenous Law Reporter, the Australian Journal of Human Rights, the Deakin Law Review, the Indigenous Law Bulletin, the University of NSW Law Journal, and University of Technology Sydney Law Journal. Also to several "Hot Topics" from AustLII's archive.
• Added a link to the "Australian Constitution: A First Reading" site, and to papers or speeches by Pat Brazil, Terry Connolly, Julie Debeljak, Jerry Everard, Robert Goodin, Ian Govey, Sir Guy Green, Michael Lavarch, John McMillan, Justice Lionel Murphy, Justice John Perry, and Gough Whitlam. As well as an update or two from the AGS site.
• Also added links (in the English Constitutional Law history subsection) to the texts of Walter Bagehot's The English Constitution, first & second editions, & also Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England. Also added links (in the General Principles & Philosophy subsection of the Discussion of Particular Issues section) to three classic texts: those of A.V. Dicey, Thomas Hobbes, & John Locke.
• Added links to assorted online teaching materials at NTU.
• Added links to some of the (MS Word format) papers at the Gilbert & Tobin Centre of Public Law website. (More will be added at the next update.)
• I have also added several more subsections to the Discussion of Particular Issues section and moved relevant material from the two Other Papers... sections into them. Another subsection I have renamed (Statehood for the Northern Territory ==> New States) due to the finding of a paper on the topic of New Zealand becoming an Australian state.

20/6/2002: This is more of an interim update than a full one, and has been prompted by a number of developments. The good news is that the National Library's Pandora archive has made available the Federal Law Review volumes 23-28, and I have therefore restored the links to these. The bad news is that the ANU's Law Faculty seems to have moved servers and in the process some of its previous material (eg the stuff on Austin & on admiralty law) has vanished from cyberspace. The links to these I have therefore disabled, along with the links to material formerly available from the Law Society of NSW (which has decided to restrict access to its journal articles) and to material at Bryan Palmer's site (which has simply vanished from the Net). The small amount of new material I've added is from Vol 28 of the FLR. (The addition of other new material will have to await a future update.)

20/7/2001: Apologies for the extreme lateness of this update, but my spare time is being largely consumed by another project. Numerous changes since the last update, including links to various copies of the convention debates, the draft bills of 1891, and to an online edition of the famous text by Quick and Garran put up by the library of Sydney University. In addition, both the Constitutional Centenary Foundation & the High Court have rearranged their websites (as has the AJHR on AustLII), breaking every link in the process. (Sigh!) These have been fixed. More grievously, the Federal Law Review's ANU site has become a subscription one, and as a result their articles have (for all practical purposes) vanished altogether from cyberspace. As partial compensation, some of MULR's are back online.

7/5/2000: The latest update has been a long time coming, and consequently is very large. The size has also made it something of an interim one. With the next update, I intend to split the existing page up into subpages, to try to lighten the load (so to speak).

7/5/2000: The Melbourne University Law Review has moved site, and as far as I can determine all its articles are currently offline (although abstracts are still available). Consequently, I have disabled all their links. The new site promises to make the text of the full articles available on a new site for the journal on AustLII. When that happens I will reactivate the links on this page.

In dividing it up I have tried not to split divisions. However, the sheer size (>200K) of the Discussion of Particular Issues one has forced me to make an exception and split it up into three separate webpages. If you're finding this new system too awkward or confusing, please let me know and I will see what I can do to rectify it.