A Culture Justification and the Queensland Human Rights Act: Evaluation and Future Prospects
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The new Commonwealth model of constitutionalism is one of the most significant interventions in the conceptions of constitutionalism in recent years. It seeks to disrupt the traditionally bifurcated conception of legal and political constitutionalism. The four key features of the new Commonwealth model are now well understood. The first is a legalised and codified charter of rights. The second is mandatory rights review of legislation by the executive and legislative branches of government. The third feature is some form of constitutional review by the courts. And the final feature of this new Commonwealth model is the Parliament having the final say on the legality of legislation. One aspect of this model which is understudied however, is the nature of this inter-institutional dialogue and whether one type should be preferred over another. This thesis approaches this question on the basis of culture. While the new Commonwealth model encourages dialogue, the site of rights protection is ultimately (and particularly in Queensland) with the executive. A culture of justification is therefore necessary in order to effectively protect human rights. This thesis answers the question: To what extent is the culture of justification reflected in executive decision making under the Human Rights Act 2019 (Qld) (QHRA)? It does this by first providing an account of the existing new Commonwealth model rights charters in Canada, Australia and New Zealand to provide the domestic and international context for the QHRA. This is followed by an in depth account of the key features of the QHRA. It then sets out a detailed conception of the culture of justification and how this can be measured by setting out a framework for assessing the extent to which the a culture of justification exists. This framework is then applied to explanatory notes accompanying legislation in the period between 1 January 2016 and 31 December 2019 and statements of compatibility between the period 1 January 2020 and 31 December 2023 to assess the extent to which a culture of justification exists. This thesis finds that there has been a meaningful but modest increase in the extent to which the culture of justification exists in executive decision making in Queensland under the QHRA. The frameworks set out in this thesis also set the basis for further study on the extent to which the culture of justification exists in human rights decision making (including for example, through administrative decisions).
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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 | 0.040 | 0.055 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.001 |
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".