This chapter considers public decision-making and children’s rights. Government action is essential to providing the legal, social and economic conditions in which children are protected from violations of their rights and provided with the environment in which they can thrive. Nonetheless, significant challenges remain in creating and securing consistent and practically effective protection for children’s rights in public law. The privatisation of many public services that affect children can create an accountability gap in which responsibility for children is fragmented. Further, any of the rights that are most important to children have a clear basis in international law, but a more uncertain foundation in domestic law. Finally, consideration of children’s interests in public decision-making and legislating is patchy, with no systematic means of reviewing policy or legislation for compatibility with children’s rights. This chapter considers these challenges before looking specifically at the issue of child poverty.

This chapter considers the role of rights in decisions concerning the health of children who are not yet competent to consent to their own medical treatment. The medical treatment of children is particularly contentious in cases involving disagreement between parents and medical professionals over the provision of life-sustaining treatment. These fraught disputes have often become a site of disagreement over the extent of parental freedom and state intervention in determining children’s best interests. Despite the obvious implications for the child’s own rights to life and bodily integrity, those rights rarely play an overt role in such decisions. A further area of contention is in the extent of parental discretion to consent to non-therapeutic intervention, such as tissue donation or circumcision. These decisions are again treated primarily as a matter of parental discretion; in practice, again the law is content to tolerate significant intervention without adequate protection for the child’s own rights.

It is well recognised in international children’s rights law that children have a right to participate in decisions concerning them. This chapter considers that right and the extent to which it is protected in domestic law. Many working within the family justice system are committed to improving children’s participation and there has been significant progress in including children in some decisions. This includes increasing judicial willingness to meet children, hear children’s evidence, grant them party status and allow competent young people to give direct instructions. Nonetheless, the system provided for representing children in family proceedings is extraordinarily complicated and the extent to which children are heard in practice varies considerably, particularly for children caught in private parental disputes. As a result, many children find that significant decisions are made about their lives without the opportunity for them to be heard or represented in the decision. Where children have been heard, the weight given to their views remains inconsistent and unpredictable, despite greater commitment in the higher courts to taking children seriously.

This chapter assesses the extent to which children’s rights are protected in domestic law. The heart of the problem for children’s rights in domestic law is that those international rights that are designed for children are not directly enforceable, while those rights that are directly enforceable have not been written for children. Further, the central place of the welfare principle in domestic child law has often been interpreted as being in conflict with a rights-based approach to children. Nevertheless, the Human Rights Act 1998 has been the vehicle for some real advances in protecting children, especially through the use of international instruments in interpreting its rights to be more effective for children. In the political sphere, children’s rights have gained greater influence, especially through the enhanced role of the Children’s Commissioner. This chapter assesses these developments and analyses the continuing weaknesses in the protection for children’s rights in law and policy.

The right to education is one of the most important rights for children, providing the foundation upon which the child’s future is built. The primary responsibility for ensuring that a child receives an education is that of the parents. That responsibility takes on particular significance in circumstances in which the convictions of the parents, or the child, are at variance with those held by the majority in society. The extent to which parents may insist that the child is educated in a way that conforms to parental values remains contentious. The law on the right to education has sought to find a balance between protecting pluralism and upholding the state’s right to run an efficient education system reflecting society’s shared values. The child’s own right to education has often been neglected in these debates. These concerns are considered with particular attention to home education, British values, religious worship and school uniform. A children’s rights approach would ensure that the children whose education is at stake are placed at the centre of a debate which is often dominated by tensions between parental freedoms and state interests.

This chapter charts the development of children’s rights in international human rights law. The centre piece of international children’s rights law is the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). This chapter explores and assesses the content and principles of the CRC and its ability to remain effective in the modern law. Particular consideration is given to the implementation and enforceability of the CRC, including the development of the individual communications procedure. The chapter then turns to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and assesses the extent to which it has been able to respond to the development of international children’s rights. Through creative interpretation, the unpromising ECHR text has become a more effective means of protecting children’s rights. Nonetheless, the limitations of the text and the practical obstacles to litigation continue to hinder children who look to enforce its rights.

This chapter considers the child’s right to identity. It is for good reason that the Convention on the Rights of the Child requires that core aspects of a child’s legal identity are in place soon after birth. A legal identity secures the child’s place in society, nation and family, providing the foundations for the child’s sense of self and relationships with others. The fact that these crucial aspects of identity are put in place when the child is an infant means that particular care must be taken to ensure that the child’s interests are not lost; not least because adults often have powerful interests in the way in which a child’s identity is determined and recorded. This chapter considers the formation of a child’s legal identity through recognition of parenthood and the challenges posed by changing reproductive technology and social norms such as the growth of international surrogacy arrangements. Further, a child’s knowledge of their genetic origins and the circumstances of their birth may be important to their sense of self and personal identity. The extent to which the right to identity incorporates a right to knowledge of origins is also considered.

This chapter discusses the development and application of international humanitarian law (IHL) and its interrelationship with human rights law. It further examines this special relationship, which is of particular importance for the protection of civilians, especially where the applicability of IHL is contested or where IHL constitutes an exception to certain rights, such as the right to life, or fails to prevent and/or provide effective remedies for violations. The chapter seeks to identify the scope of application of IHL and demonstrate the degree to which the two can be reconciled. Moreover, a special case is made for the law applicable in situations of military occupation whereby human rights are subordinate to IHL. Despite this subordination, in practice because international human rights tribunals are not mandated to apply humanitarian law they necessarily interpret and enforce the rights of the victims on the basis of the rights found in their respective statutes. As a result, the jurisprudence of human rights tribunals is not always consistent with IHL. Yet, such tribunals are hard pressed to accept jurisdiction over situations which would otherwise be resolved on the basis of IHL alone. This chapter therefore goes on to discuss the exercise of extraterritorial jurisdiction by human rights tribunals.

The chapter begins by explaining the complementary role of criminal law in the application of international human rights. It then goes on to analyse the function of the concept of individual criminal responsibility under international law and its relationship to human rights violations. Subsequently, we examine the processes and mechanisms for enforcement of criminal rules under international law with an emphasis on policy rather than the procedural rules underpinning jurisdiction. The ‘peace versus justice’ debate, namely whether international prosecution should sometimes be side-lined in favour of negotiated solutions to ongoing conflicts, is an integral part of this discussion. Finally, the chapter concludes with an analysis of the two core mass international crimes, namely genocide and crimes against humanity with a view to demonstrating that their formulation is largely based on human rights (i.e. rights of victims), rather than criminal law, considerations.

Chapter 18 focuses on the important issue of teacher salaries. Teacher salaries are important because, like any other workers, teachers and prospective teachers care about their compensation and how it compares to compensation offered in other professions. The issue of teacher salaries also illustrates the effect of compensation on teacher behavior – not just whether young people go into teaching, but also who decides to become a teacher, where they teach, how well they teach, and how long they choose to stay in the profession. The chapter first discusses the issue of real versus nominal wages of teachers in the United States and other developed countries over time, followed by a discussion of relative wages, or how salaries in teaching compare to salaries in comparable occupations, and how changes in relative salaries may affect the “quality” of the supply of teachers. The chapter then compares relative teacher salaries internationally. The final sections focus on the use of the uniform salary schedule and discuss the various forms of teacher incentive pay, including a review of the impact of incentive pay on student performance.

Chapter 10 reviews the tenuous relation between the level and distribution of education and the distribution of income, beginning with early arguments about economic development and income distribution. The discussion turns to the human capital model of personal income distribution, then to whether the skills distribution predictive of income distribution is years of schooling or measures of knowledge in the labor force, then to more recent longitudinal analyses that include human capital variables. This review also assesses various empirical methodologies estimating the relationship of educational expansion and skills distribution to income distribution. The main division is between models that analyze the relationship across countries and those that analyze longitudinal data on changes over time within countries. The chapter analyzes the reasons why it has been difficult to show that even in highly educated countries, the earnings distribution does not necessarily compress as the distribution of years of schooling or skills compresses.

Foreign currency is defined in s 995-1 ITAA97 as a currency other than Australian currency, digital currency or anything prescribed by the regulations (s 995-1 ITAA97). Digital currency has the same meaning as it does under the GSTA. Many transactions that affect taxpayers may occur in foreign currency. To deal with situations like these, the ITAA97 has special rules for translating foreign currency into Australian currency. The aim of these rules is to ensure that transactions that occur in foreign currency are converted into Australian dollars (‘A$’) so that a standard unit of account is used for calculating a taxpayer’s Australian income tax liabilities. It is important to be aware that transactions that occur in foreign currency can also result in taxpayers making exchange gains and exchange losses as a result of currency fluctuations. A special forex regime is contained in the ITAA97 for dealing with the tax treatment of such gains and losses.

The income tax legislation contains complex accruals regimes that attribute income earned by foreign entities to Australian resident taxpayers who control them or have transferred value to them. Attribution occurs even though these taxpayers have not actually received the relevant income. This chapter outlines the basic features of the accruals regimes and the way they attribute income to certain taxpayers. The accruals regimes were introduced in the early 1990s and are based on United States measures that were originally developed in the 1960s. They are designed to prevent the deferral advantages associated with having certain kinds of income sheltered offshore in tax havens through interests held by taxpayers in foreign entities. Ordinarily, such income would be able to accumulate at low (or zero) tax rates in such entities until repatriated to Australia. The accruals measures operate to bring forward the point at which such income is taxed. Essentially, resident controllers and transferors are taxed on income earned by the relevant entities (eg companies or trusts) as those entities earn the income (ie on an accruals basis), rather than only when those entities subsequently distribute amounts (eg by way of dividends or trust distributions).