Taking parliamentary sovereignty seriously within a Bill of Rights framework

The Victorian Government has made a commitment to consult with the community on how best to protect and promote human rights in Victoria. To this end, it has established a Human Rights Consultation Committee to undertake this consultation and to report on the desirability or otherwise of enacting a Bill of Rights. The government has, however, indicated its preference for a statutory Bill of Rights and one that preserves the 'sovereignty of Parliament'. This article takes those two government preferences as its baseline and then explores what might follow if the preservation of parliamentary sovereignty is taken seriously within a Victorian rights framework.

The distribution of discoursal salience in research papers: relational hypotaxis and parataxis

In this article I challenge the claim that nuclearity is a central principle in the organization of texts. I propose the Framework for the Relational Analysis of Texts (FARS) which accounts for the paratactic and hypotactic realization of coherence relations. Within this framework, the taxis of coherence relations is co-textually dictated. I consider the writer choices in the distribution of discoursal salience and the intertextual and intercultural variation of these choices. It is suggested that divergence between approaches that perceive text as exhibiting both hypotactic and paratactic organization and those that see nuclearity as a basic characteristic of text structure arises from differences in the linguistic corpora examined during the construction of respective theoretical frameworks.

Ivy Brookes presenting the Alfred Deakin papers to the National Library of Australia

Alfred Deakin's daughters seated in the foreground from left to right: Lady Vera White, Lady Stella Rivett and Ivy Brookes; Professor J. La Nauze (Deakin's biographer) is the standing gentleman, second from the left; the Hon. Robert G. Menzies is standing on the far right next to the desk

Prevention of suicide : police powers, parliamentary intent and judicial interpretation

While in most countries suicide is no longer a crime, it is also acknowledged that the state has an interest in the preservation of human life, prevention of suicide, and protection of vulnerable persons from harming themselves. In a civil, secular and democratic society, however, the public law principle of state protective powers has to be balanced against the private law principle of personal autonomy (personal self-determination). Under the doctrine of autonomy, competent adults of sound mind can make legally binding voluntary choices, including the so-called ‘death-choice’ (refusal of life-sustaining or life-prolonging treatment as well as suicide). To add to the complexity, whereas the powers of the state in relation to suicide and its prevention have been codified, the concepts of personal autonomy and personal liberty are grounded in common law. Stuart v Kirkland–Veenstra [2008] VSCA 32, which is at present being considered by the High Court of Australia, exemplifies tensions that arise in the suicide-prevention area of jurisprudence. This article explores powers and duties of police officers in relation to suicide prevention and the notion of mental illness by reference to the Kirkland–Veenstra case, the relevant statutory framework and the common law.

Community development and ecology : engaging ecological sustainability through community development : selected papers from a conference held in Melbourne, 26-28 March 2008

The papers consider such questions as how to build community resilience in the context of profound environmental threat, how to ensure sustainability through community processes and how to assess community progress in responding to threats to the ecosystem.

"-we are not competing with bigger papers - we are doing a different job" : a study of country Australian news values

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