Division Of Powers In Australia Essay

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The Australian Constitution is one of the most important documents ever produced in the history of our nation, since Federation. The constitution was established in 1901 and was written by high court judges. Section 51 is the constitution high court judges refer to most commonly today, they use the constitution to interpret laws. The Australian Government has different powers and sectors; these powers have been divided between the states and the Commonwealth government. This is referred to as the Division of Powers. It has been argued that the division of powers is poorly defined within the Australian Constitution as there have been many cases in history where these powers have been abused and in turn new rulings have been passed by the high …show more content…

The first uniform tax case; (s.51) was a concurrent power shared with the states, this in turn gave the commonwealth the right to levy taxation. The high court passed this ruling and therefore the states were no longer given the power to levy their own income taxes. Another relevant case to this topic is the Franklin Dam Case, the commonwealth attempted to use their external affairs power for something that is normally seen as a residual power. The high court approved this and Tasmania was banned from making the Franklin River into a dam as it was changed to a world heritage site through external affairs powers under an international …show more content…

More specifically their role is a check and balance system, abuses of power by the states or commonwealth and can deem these matters unconstitutional or can pass cases and make new laws or rulings. The balance of power can be affected by the high court as they interpret what they believe they are reading in the constitution and the majority of cases passed have been in favour of the commonwealth power and have been at the expense of the states. An argument in favour of this point has been that because we don’t have a vetting procedure when it comes to appointing high court judges the commonwealth has even more power in this area as they can set up or push for the appointment of a high court judge that they know will sway towards their

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