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The fed­eral government’s changes to the Elect­oral Act

• Dodsworth dvd

Harry Pot­ter and the Gob­let of Fire hd

• Pit and the Pen­du­lum download

Ride in the Whirl­wind in 2006 were largely over­looked, and yet they rep­res­en­ted another aspect in the government’s piece­meal dis­mant­ling of demo­cratic rights in Aus­tralia. The dis­en­fran­chise­ment of pris­on­ers serving gaol sen­tences of less than 3 years, the most egre­gious of these changes, was cer­tainly a polit­ical mas­ter­stroke. After all, with a grow­ing prison pop­u­la­tion who largely vote Labor, it was an inspired decision to remove a few thou­sand votes that could have meant the dif­fer­ence between a win and a loss in mar­ginal seats. Fur­ther, who the hell likes pris­on­ers? What group in soci­ety could be less worthy of sym­pathy? The only sort of people who would oppose it are civil-libertarian law­yer types (like my LLJ lecturer).

So when a female pris­oner decided to chal­lenge the government’s changes earlier this year, I was doubt­ful that it would suc­ceed. Even dur­ing the height of its “act­iv­ism” under Chief Justice Mason, the High Court only man­aged to find an implied right to free­dom of polit­ical com­mu­nic­a­tion — not a par­tic­u­larly sub­stant­ive one, nowhere near free­dom of speech, and eas­ily defeated.

I like being sur­prised though, and the High Court delivered nicely, when it struck out the government’s elect­oral law changes in rela­tion to pris­on­ers

Middletown video . George Wil­li­ams con­siders it a “land­mark” ruling.

“Never in our his­tory have we had a vin­dic­a­tion of our right to vote. This is the first someone has actu­ally won the right to vote in the High Court,” Pro­fessor Wil­li­ams said.

What should be inter­est­ing to law stu­dents here is that the Court delivered its decision without a judg­ment. Appar­ently this is so that the Aus­tralian Elect­oral Com­mis­sion can quickly start enrolling the eli­gible pris­on­ers. If they had to wait the weeks or months for the Court’s judg­ment, the elec­tion cam­paign may well be under way. Non­ethe­less, it reveals what we had sus­pec­ted all along. The judi­cial pre­tense that the res­ult of decisions comes only after rig­or­ous ana­lysis of the law and facts is a charade. Judges choose the res­ult they like and then cherry pick the pre­ced­ent that suits them from the smör­gås­bord available.

The order from Chief Justice Gleeson indic­ates that the chal­lenge was decided on an inter­pret­a­tion of sec­tions 7 and 24 of the con­sti­tu­tion — sec­tions asso­ci­ated with the implied rights school, and rather unchar­ac­ter­istic of this court. I look for­ward to the final judg­ment and find­ing out who dis­sen­ted in this case. I’m guess­ing for once it is not Kirby J.