Content Listing

Summary

Australian public law is the body of law which constitutes and empowers the many and varied officials and institutions comprising the Australian state, and which limits, regulates, and renders accountable the exercise of power by those officials and institutions.

At the heart of Australian public law are the three concepts referred to in the subtitle of this book – state, power, and accountability. The entity towards which the normative force of Australian public law is primarily directed is the Australian state, a multifaceted phenomenon possessed of great power over those individuals and groups who are subject to its authority. A key aim of Australian public law is to regulate the exercise of the state's power so as to optimise the benefits the state can provide to the Australian people and, at the same time, mitigate the significant risks the state poses to those people. Arguably, the most important and effective means by which this optimisation of benefits and mitigation of risks is ensured is through Australian public law's establishment and empowerment of further state-based accountability mechanisms: processes, officials, and institutions whose function is to render the agents of the Australian state answerable for their actions to the Australian people. In these three concepts, then, the object, rationale, and modus operandi of Australian public law are most fundamentally articulated.

This book seeks to provide its readers with an understanding of the theoretical, historical, structural, and doctrinal foundations of Australian public law, sufficient for them to go on and engage effectively with its more fine-grained, complex, and innovative aspects, whether as law students, legal practitioners, bureaucrats, or citizens. It seeks to present a clearly narrated and conceptually and structurally coherent account of the fundamental social and political exigencies, risks, and problems Australian public law is designed to address, as well as the basic values and purposes which guide the operation of that law in addressing those things. The book is concerned as much with ‘the why’ of Australian public law as it is with ‘the what’.

The term ‘foundations’ in relation to a complex legal discourse such as public law connotes a notion of simplicity or simplification. Identifying, describing, and reflecting upon such foundations is rightly understood as a means of making the complex simple – though not simplistic.

Summary

Introduction

In the preceding chapters we explored the nature of public law and state power, the limits public law imposes on the exercise of state power, and the ways in which the exercise of state power is rendered accountable to the people of Australia. Our inquiry so far, then, has largely been structural. We have been concerned with the constitutional structure of the Australian state and with the legal regulation of the exercise of power by the component agents of that state.

In this chapter, I want to shift our perspective from an understanding of Australian public law as the law which empowers and regulates the state to an understanding of Australian public law as the law which confers upon us – the individual subjects of the state – rights against the state, and which provides legal, state-based mechanisms to protect and enforce those rights.

One of the key roles performed by lawyers in Australia is to serve as agents for the protection of the rights of clients. More generally, it is to serve as advocates for the protection of the rights of all legal subjects. It is imperative, then, that those who aspire to practise law understand the nature of those individual rights against the state which Australian public law provides.

Public law and rights against the state

Duties and rights

We saw in Chapter 1 that law imposes legal duties on its subjects. The general law of a jurisdiction imposes duties generally upon its subjects – both private citizens and public officials. Under the general criminal law operative within a jurisdiction, for example, both private citizens and public officials may be under a duty not to assault or steal from others within the jurisdiction.

In its empowerment and regulation of public officials and institutions, public law, too, imposes legal duties on those officials and institutions. Section 5 of the Commonwealth Constitution, for example, imposes a legal duty on the Governor-General to summon the Parliament to meet ‘not later than thirty days after the day appointed for the return of the writs’ after a general election of the Parliament.

Summary

The legislative power of the Australian state

One of the key functions of the modern state is law-making or legislating. Throughout Australia, the practice of legislating is governed by public law. Public law creates state agents and empowers them to make laws. It regulates them in relation to how they go about their legislative activities, and it calls them to account for how they have exercised their legislative power. We saw in Chapter 3 that in Australia, legislation is a mode of state action carried out by all three branches of state – legislative, executive, and judicial – at all levels – Commonwealth, State, Territory, and local government. Though we often assume that legislation is carried out only by Australia's legislatures, laws are also made by administrative and judicial agents at the three levels of government in Australia, as well as by local governments.

In this chapter I want to explore the issue of legislation through the lens of Australian public law's conferral, limitation, and regulation of legislative power in relation to the Commonwealth and State parliaments and the Territorial assemblies. This will be supplemented in later chapters by discussion of the legislative activities of Australia's executive and judicial branches.

A key aim of this chapter is to lay the groundwork for our being able to effectively evaluate the validity – that is, the lawfulness – of the exercise of legislative power in Australia by any of its state agents. With a basic understanding in hand about how legislative power is lawfully exercised in Australia, we will be able to determine the validity of any statute, statutory provision, regulation or local law enacted by agents of the Australian state. Being able to do this will not only contribute to our effectiveness as public lawyers but also to our effectiveness as vigilant citizens concerned about the protection of liberal democratic values and the realisation of the rule of law in Australia.

Summary

Introduction

In order to understand Australian public law, we need to understand the nature of the Australian state. As mentioned in the previous chapter, one of the things which characterises that state is its historical development. The present structure of the Australian state and much of the present content of Australian public law are a product of that development. Hence, our understanding of Australian public law will be enhanced by exploring that development. Doing so is the aim of this chapter.

Though the Australian state, as it presently stands, was founded in 1901, it had a colonial pre-history which determined much of the structure, procedures, and political morality it went on to adopt at its founding and which it maintains today. For example, the fact that Australia today is a federation of States and Commonwealth with a bicameral national Parliament whose upper house, the Senate, represents (to some extent, at least) the distinctive interests of the people of each State is entirely the result of its comprising six discrete colonies established by Great Britain over the course of the nineteenth century. Had Australia not undergone this particular historical trajectory, there seems little reason to think that its contemporary state structure would be that of a federation – let alone the kind of federation we actually have – or that the upper house of its national Parliament would (nominally, at least) serve the function of representing the interests of the people of each State.

Likewise, the fact that the Commonwealth and State parliaments all operate according to the rules of the Westminster model of government, and that many of those rules are not expressly elaborated in the written constitutions of those jurisdictions, is the result of the six colonies of Australia having operated according to those unwritten rules for decades prior to the drafting of the Commonwealth Constitution in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Many of the contemporary features of Australian public law would be puzzling – indeed, inexplicable – without a basic grasp of the history of the Australian state.

Summary

Judicial power and the Australian state

Adjudication and the state

In order for a legal system to pursue effectively the realisation of its generic functions and specific social ends and values – whether politico-moral or policy-based – its private legal subjects and its public officials must, to some significant extent, comply with its laws. There are two dimensions of this compliance requirement. First, private legal subjects and public officials must have (or must be able to acquire) a reasonably clear idea of what the law actually is and how it is to apply to a given factual situation. They must be able to comply with the law, if they are so disposed. They must have a reasonably clear idea of what their respective legal rights and duties are. The second dimension of the compliance requirement is that those who do not comply – or who, more broadly, are not disposed to comply with the law – are brought to account for that non-compliance. This is to say that the law must be appropriately enforced upon its subjects, including public officials.

These particular demands of a legally governed society are served by the promulgation of a category of secondary legal rules (rules of public law) which we termed in Chapter 1, ‘rules of adjudication’. Such rules provide for:

Summary

Introduction: Public law and political morality

The political morality of the state

We saw in Chapter 1 that although the generic functions of law and state in maintaining social order and security, coordinating social agents, and creating formal social roles and responsibilities are common to all legal systems and states, different states and their legal systems may be oriented towards the pursuit of quite different social ends and values. The most important set of ends and values a state and its legal system are oriented towards comprises the political morality of that state and legal system. The political morality of a state is the set of fundamental ends and values concerned with how the people in the society should be treated and how the society as a whole should ultimately operate. It reflects the kind of social governance arrangements considered most desirable by law's beneficiaries. It embodies a conception not only of the kind of society law's beneficiaries think ought to be sought after but also the kind of state most conducive to the realisation and maintenance of such a society, as well as the way the pursuit of that ideal by the state should be carried out.

An important point here is that the fundamental politico-moral values of a state generally serve or otherwise reflect its fundamental politico-moral ends. So, for example, one fundamental political end of a state might be the realisation of a society in which all members are treated with equal respect – including by the state itself. The political end here is the establishment of a state which treats all its subjects optimally and equally with respect, and which ensures that its subjects treat each other likewise. However, a state whose present-day actions and ongoing dealings with its subjects were not, at least, guided by the principle or value that those subjects should be accorded an optimal and equal degree of respect by state agents would not be effective in realising that fundamental and longer-term end. The pursuit of the fundamental end in question demands a present and ongoing compliance with the value here.

Thus, within a political morality, the distinction between ends and values may not be readily discernible. In the case just mentioned, the end and the value in question are virtually identical in their content.

Summary

Introduction

We saw in the previous chapter that one of the key roles of judicial agents of state in Australia is to render other agents of state accountable for their actions. That judicial agents are both legally empowered to do so and actually do so is a fundamental condition of the operation of the rule of law in Australia. As such, the exercise of judicial power also serves as a key mechanism in Australian public law for the protection of individual rights – particularly against any intrusion upon them by the executive government and its bureaucracy. The key means by which the judiciary calls administrative agents to account for their actions under the law is termed the judicial review of administrative action.

The judicial review of administrative action is concerned with:

Summary

Introduction

In this final chapter, I want to explore two trends which are currently emerging as highly significant within the rules and practice of Australian public law and are likely to develop an even greater profile in the decades to come. These are: the recognition of Australia's Indigenous peoples, and the effects of globalisation on Australian public law and the Australian state. It is plausible to think that both these trends will serve as focal points for important future changes in the structure, content, and rationale of Australian public law and the Australian state, as well as in the relations between that state and its subjects.

Though the focus of this chapter is limited, this should not be taken to deny the existence of other important trends. Other issues worth reflecting upon as likely to be important loci of challenge and change in Australian public law in the future include:

Summary

This book is designed to be used in a quarter- or semester-long senior-level undergraduate linear control systems class. Readers are assumed to have had some exposure to differential equations and complex numbers (good references are [BD12] and [BC14]), and to have some familiarity with the engineering notion of signals and systems (a standard reference is [Lat04]). It is also assumed that the reader has access to a high-level software program, such as MATLAB, to perform calculations in many of the homework problems. In order to keep the focus on the content, examples in the book do not discuss MATLAB syntax or features. Instead, we provide supplementary MATLAB files which can produce all calculations and figures appearing in the book. These files can be downloaded from http://www.cambridge.org/deOliveira.

Chapters 1 and 2 provide a quick overview of the basic concepts in control, such as feedback, tracking, dynamics, disturbance rejection, integral action, etc. Math is kept at a very basic level and the topics are introduced with the help of familiar examples, such as a simplistic model of a car and a toilet bowl.

Chapter 3 formalizes the concept of a transfer-function for dynamic linear system models. Its first part is a review of the Laplace transform and its application to linear ordinary differential equations. The second part introduces systems concepts such as stability, transient and steady-state response, and the frequency response method. Some topics, e.g. complex integration, the calculus of residues, and norms of signals and systems, are covered in more depth than is usually found in typical introductory courses, and can be safely skipped at first read.

Equipped with the concept of a transfer-function, Chapter 4 formalizes fundamental concepts in feedback analysis, such as tracking, sensitivity, asymptotic and internal stability, disturbance rejection, measurement noise, etc. Homework problems in this chapter expose readers to these concepts and anticipate the more sophisticated analytic methods to be introduced in the following chapters.

Chapter 5 takes a slight detour from classic methods to introduce the reader to statespace models. The focus is on practical questions, such as realization of dynamic systems and controllers, linearization of nonlinear systems, and basic issues that arise when using linear controllers with nonlinear systems.

Summary

In controls we make use of the abstract concept of a system: we identify a phenomenon or a process, the system, and two classes of signals, which we label as inputs and outputs. A signal is something that can be measured or quantified. In this book we use real numbers to quantify signals. The classification of a particular signal as an input means that it can be identified as the cause of a particular system behavior, whereas an output signal is seen as the product or consequence of the behavior. Of course the classification of a phenomenon as a system and the labeling of input and output signals is an abstract construction. A mathematical description of a system and its signals is what constitutes a model. The entire abstract construction, and not only the equations that we will later associate with particular signals and systems, is the model.

We often represent the relationship between a system and its input and output signals in the form of a block-diagram, such as the ones in Fig. 1.1 through Fig. 1.3. The diagram in Fig. 1.1 indicates that a system, G, produces an output signal, y, in the presence of the input signal, u. Block-diagrams will be used to represent the interconnection of systems and even algorithms. For example, Fig. 1.2 depicts the components and signals in a familiar controlled system, a water heater; the block-diagram in Fig. 1.3 depicts an algorithm for converting temperature in degrees Fahrenheit to degrees Celsius, in which the output of the circle in Fig. 1.3 is the algebraic sum of the incoming signals with signs as indicated near the incoming arrows.

Models and Experiments

Systems, signals, and models are often associated with concrete or abstract experiments. A model reflects a particular setup in which the outputs appear correlated with a prescribed set of inputs. For example, we might attempt to model a car by performing the following experiment: on an unobstructed and level road, we depress the accelerator pedal and let the car travel in a straight line. We keep the pedal excursion constant and let the car reach constant velocity. We record the amount the pedal has been depressed and the car's terminal velocity.

Summary

In Chapter 1 we contemplated solutions to our first control problem, a much simplified cruise controller for a car, without taking into account possible effects of time. System and controller models were static relations between the signals: the output signal, y, the input signal, u, the reference input, y, and then the disturbance, w. Signals in block-diagrams flow instantaneously, and closed-loop solutions derived from such block-diagrams were deemed reasonable if they could be implemented fast enough. We drew encouraging conclusions from simple analysis but no rationale was given to support the conclusions if time were to be taken into consideration.

Of course, it is perfectly fine to construct a static mathematical model relating a car's pedal excursion with its terminal velocity, as long as we understand the model setup. Clearly a car does not reach its terminal velocity instantaneously! If we expect to implement the feedback cruise controller in a real car, we have to be prepared to say what happens between the time at which a terminal target velocity is set and the time at which the car reaches its terminal velocity. Controllers have to understand that it takes time for the car to reach its terminal velocity. That is, we will have to incorporate time not only into models and tools but also into controllers. For this reason we need to learn how to work with dynamic systems.

In the present book, mathematical models for dynamic systems take the form of ordinary differential equations where signals evolve continuously in time. Bear in mind that this is not a course on differential equations, and previous exposure to the mathematical theory of differential equations helps. Familiarity with material covered in standard text books, e.g. [BD12], is enough. We make extensive use of the Laplace transform and provide a somewhat self-contained review of relevant facts in Chapter 3.

These days, when virtually all control systems are implemented in some form of digital computer, one is compelled to justify why not to discuss control systems directly from the point of view of discrete-time signals and systems. One reason is that continuous-time signals and systems have a long tradition in mathematics and physics that has established a language that most scientists and engineers are accustomed to.

Textbooks

Refine search

Refine search

Actions for selected content:

38627 results in Cambridge Textbooks

Preface

Summary

Chapter 9 - Protection: Human rights and Australian public law

Summary

Chapter 5 - Legislation: Making valid law

Summary

Chapter 2 - Constitution I: The history of the Australian state

Summary

Table of cases

Contents

Table of statutes

Chapter 7 - Adjudication: Determining and applying law

Summary

Chapter 4 - Legitimation: Justifying state power

Summary

Chapter 8 - Validation: Reviewing state action

Summary

Frontmatter

Chapter 10 - Direction: Future trends in Australian public law

Summary

Contents

3 - Transfer-Function Models

6 - Controller Design

4 - Feedback Analysis

Overview

Summary

1 - Introduction

Summary

2 - Dynamic Systems

Summary

References

Textbooks

Refine search

Refine search

Actions for selected content:

Save Search

38627 results in Cambridge Textbooks

Summary

Summary

Summary

Summary

Summary

Summary

Summary

Summary

Summary

Summary

Summary