Page 1040 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 19 March 1991
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ADJOURNMENT
MR SPEAKER: It being slightly past 9.30 pm, I propose the question:
That the Assembly do now adjourn.
Weapons Legislation
MR CONNOLLY (9.33): Unfortunately, Mr Stevenson is not present, but I will send him a copy of Hansard because if he reads it he will be no wiser but, perhaps, better informed. On Thursday I listened with interest - as, I noted, did the Attorney-General - to Mr Stevenson's explanations to why the gun Act was unconstitutional. I must say that at the time I did not understand what he was talking about.
I have since read his speech in Hansard and also read a document that he tabled called "A Review of Law", written, I understand, by a person by the name of Mr Schulze, who, Mr Stevenson tells us, is a solicitor from Sydney. I now understand what Mr Stevenson was talking about.
What Mr Stevenson has done is cobble together a series of quotes from judges in New South Wales in the period 1828 to 1844 dealing with the repugnancy of New South Wales colonial legislation to English Acts of parliament. Judges at that time had the clear power to say that instruments of that subordinate legislature which were repugnant to English law were invalid, and they so held. The cases that he referred to were, of course, pre effective self-government in Australia, which dated from 1856. The issue was revived later in the 1860s by Judge Boothby in South Australia and led to the passage of the Colonial Laws Validity Act, which was an act of the British Parliament which stipulated the circumstances in which Acts of colonial legislatures were valid.
Even after that time there were criteria by which Acts of a colonial parliament could be held to be invalid. Up until 1931 Mr Stevenson's point could have had some validity; that is, there could have been an argument that an instrument of a State-level parliament could have been invalid because it was repugnant to British law. That argument, of course, completely disappeared after 1931 with the passage of the Statute of Westminster. That demolition of Mr Stevenson's argument is made even more definite by the passage of the Australia Act in 1986, which clearly states that the laws of a State parliament - and we can read for that "a Territory parliament" - are valid.
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