The extent to which the motives of providers and recipients (of care) diverge can be seen in the nursing home market – nominally under regulation, but at the worst deteriorating into a real estate market with revenue generating aged persons attached to the property like serfs to the manor.

The profit making people in the nursing homes know full well how to be quite ruthless and brutal in trying to mobilize emotional responses in the community against a government so that they can exploit the taxpayer by forcing a government into paying out more money … when it suited the private commercial nursing home people, patients were moved on litters out of their nursing homes to the edge of the footpaths of the street outside the homes. It was arranged for the media, particularly the visual media, to cover the whole exercise. All sorts of emotional displays were indulged in.

Although the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (hereafter referred to as the AAT) does not enjoy an express power to review policy considerations taken into account in reaching a decision under review, such a power has been taken to have been impliedly conferred by s 43 of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal Act 1975 (Cth) (hereafter referred to as the AAT Act).

Section 43(1) empowers the Trjbunal to exercise all the powers and discretions conferred on the decision-maker whose decision is subject to review. It empowers the Tribunal to affirm, vary or set aside the decision under review, and to make a decision in substitution for the decision so set aside or to remit the matter for reconsideration in accordance with any directions or recommendations of the Tribunal. Section 43(6) provides that the decision made by the AAT in substitution for the decision made by the original decision-maker shall be deemed to be a decision of the original decision-maker.

The possibility that an Australian State might one day seek to unilaterally secede from the Commonwealth has always held an ambiguous position in the political and constitutional folklore of Australia. On the one hand, such a notion conjures up visions of rampant political idiosyncrasy so ludicrous as to provoke little more than amused disbelief. On the other, even to pose the conceptual question of the disintegration of the painstakingly constructed and laboriously maintained Australian federal structure is to raise an issue almost too distasteful to contemplate. The status of secession as both a political and constitutional topic has thus essentially been that of a joke, but of a joke which, when fully considered, might be regarded as being in thoroughly bad taste.

Most High Court decisions which touch upon the Australian Constitution are posthumously examined in academic literature. Some, though too few, have been subjected to more lengthy and detailed analysis. The Franklin Dam case is not an exception. Within eighteen months, it has consumed a substantial number of pages of commentary. Prominent are discussions concerning specific constitutional powers — corporations, race, external affairs and nationhood — and prohibitions — ss 51(xxxi) and 100 and implied restrictions. General premises and themes which underlie the processes of constitutional adjudication have attracted rather less attention. There has been some enunciation of interpretative principles and discussion of the political dimensions of judicial review. Further elaboration would be invaluable. Perhaps, commentators are waiting for the dust to settle before advancing to these, and other, more nebulous aspects of constitutional decision-making. When they do so, the dimensions of Australian constitutional law scholarship could be irretrievably enhanced.

Taxation — Assignment by deed of share in partnership — Effect of assignment on accumulated partnership income — Income Tax Assessment Act 1936 (Cth) ss 92, 95, 102.

Michael Bernard Galland (“the taxpayer”) carried on practice as a solicitor in partnership with his father, under the name of “Bernard L. Galland & Co” (“the partnership”), during the 1979-80 year of income. The partnership agreement provided, inter alia, for the equal division of profits and losses which were to be ascertained in July after the preparation of accounts in respect of the previous financial year.