Jan Henkel

Should the High Court or the Parliament determine the rights and freedoms of Australians Jan Henkel

Essay from the year 2004 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Region: Australia, New Zealand, grade: credit (70/100), The University of Sydney (Faculty of Economics and Business), course: Australian Politics, 12 entries in the bibliography, language: English, comment: This work deals with rights and freedoms of Australians and with the fact if it s better for a democracy if the judiciary or the legislation has more power. , abstract: It is known that in a democracy there are, in general, three different branches of the government: the legislative, the executive and the judicial branch. This essay explores the relative powers of the legislation and the judiciary in determining the freedoms and rights of modern days Australians. It specifically questions whether the High Court or the Parliament should determine the rights and freedoms of Australians. If you examine modern day theories of democracy, you will discover that the legislative branch of government is traditionally responsible for making law and the judiciary for interpreting law. These two bodies, as they are respectively known in Australia, are the Parliament and the High Court. Between these two bodies, an intimate relationship exists that inevitably leads to interpretive and political conflicts, namely because it is "the judge it is who must decide what the Act means" (Gifford, p.39). The main difficulty of this implicit conflict is a subjective determination concerning exactly where the power of the legislation, in our case the Parliament, ends and where the power of the judiciary, in our case the High Court, begins. In answering the main question of this essay, one must also address the relevant moral dimensions associated with this relationship. In adopting this methodology, I shall be able to decide which alternative is the better. Is it preferable if the High Court determines the rights and freedoms or should that be a task of the Parliament? First of all I think it is necessa