Book Review: Labor and the Constitution 1972–1975
| Published date | 01 September 1977 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0067205X7700800306 |
| Author | Ninian Stephen |
| Date | 01 September 1977 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
BOOK REVIEWS
Labor and the Constitution 1972-1975, edited by
GARETH
EVANS;
(Heinemann,
1977),
pp. i-xv, 1-383. Cloth, recommended retail price
$20.00 (ISBN: 085859 146
4);
Paperback, recommended retail price
$12.50 (ISBN: 085859 147
2).
"The Whitlam Years in Australian
Government"-the
nostalgia of
the sub-title fails to reckon with the presence of the eponym himself,
felt almost tangibly throughout the first three hundred pages of other
men's (and two women's) comments on his "years" and eloquent in
an unmistakably present tense in Whitlam's own concluding contri-
bution to these essays and commentaries on the constitutional
controversies of three years of Labor rule.
Melbourne University's August 1976 Seminar, which was the
occasion for the delivery of the essays and commentaries gathered
together in this book, did, for some, have atrue nostalgia. When
Geoffrey Sawer spoke from that same dais from which he had taught
constitutional law thirty years ago, he evoked the shades of an earlier,
now vintage Sawer, expounding asimpler, less controversial Consti-
tution in which Commonwealth Law Reports numbered in the seventies
and Senates and Governors-General played no part, transport cases and
marketing boards jigging instead in eccentric orbit round section 92's
maypole. But such gentle shades soon disperse before the sharper
emotions of
11
November 1975 which, perhaps for the first time in 75
years, have given Australian constitutional law anew cutting edge,
apparent throughout the Seminar weekend. Gareth Evans, who both
edited this book and played aleading part in the organisation of the
Seminar, speaks in his preface of it being held "after the dust ofpartisan
controversy had settled alittle". Yet what gave the Seminar its iunique
savour were the clouds of such dust still there to be kicked
up
by any
passing foot.
In
print this special effervescence of the times
is
largely missing, but
the substance remains; the essay writers and commentators account
for not quite all of Australia's leading academic constitutional lawyers
and there are also contributions from such notable actors in the
constitutional crises
of
those, years as the former Commonwealth
Attorney-General
Mr
Ellicott and the Solicitor-General.
Areview of the work of almost thirty contributors avoids mere
precis only at the risk of leaving much unsaid. This should be said
at
the outset: for all those concerned with Australian government or
with the law of its C'onstitution the book
is
invaluable for its discussion
of many of the intractable problems of
our
federal system. These are
discussed very fully from alawyer's standpoint, although to apolitical
scientist the emphasis may appear to be too much towards the law and
judicial interpretation of the Constitution. This may, however, be no
more than the necessary consequence for any polity whose consti-
tutional shape
is
dictated by an Imperial statute
~nd
interpreted in a
common law tradition.
368
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