The Laws of Nature, State or Federal?: A Legal History of the Informal Transition of Responsibility over Environmental Policy in the Australian Commonwealth, 1974–1983
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Between 1974 and 1983 the Australian Federal Government in Canberra enacted a series of legislations that were designed to gradually transfer authority for environmental policy away from the state governments and towards itself. This informal transition was enacted, built upon, and completed by three consecutive governments representing both of the country’s main political parties, indicating the bi-partisan attitude towards the need to reform the federal relationship in Australia during this period of “new federalism”. This paper represents one of the first attempts to look at the legislative development of federal environmental policies through a heavy analysis of legal documents to produce a legal history that ascertains the legality of Canberra’s unprecedented legislation. Through this process it becomes apparent that the development of these pieces of legislation can be divided into two discernible historical periods defined by their effectiveness in asserting a federal presence in Australian environmental policymaking. In the background of these developments are important questions concerning the traditional emphasis placed by the High Court of Australia on state rights, and Canberra’s cautious manoeuvring around this contentious issue. In doing so, this paper helps to expand upon the relatively small body of work surrounding this period of great constitutional change in Australia, suggesting that these developments were instrumental in the fundamental changes to the federal relationship which are associated with the governments of Gough Whitlam, Malcolm Fraser, and Bob Hawke respectively.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".