The Shadow Legislative Competence

The Commonwealth government said on that second day, your honours, what was until sometime yesterday morning, the common assumption of the parties and interveners, has become a very large question. And so this was an example where we had, and the High Court did indeed throw out the common assumption, said you need to have a specific authority passed by legislation, or somewhere else in the constitution, to authorise spending. This was an extraordinary decision at the time. It forced the federal parliament into very quickly acting a remedial legislation to try and plug this gap. But there's a question here which is when the court isn't changing its mind because there wasn't a previous decision it was overturning