The Invisible Constitution in Comparative Perspective

R v. Director-General of Social Welfare, Ex Parte Henry (1975) 133 CLR 369, 388; General 

Practitioners Society v. Commonwealth (1980) 145 CLR 532; Ansett Transport Industries  

(Operations) Pty Ltd v. Wardley (1980) 142 CLR 237, 267; Ansett Transport Industries (Operations) 

Pty Ltd v. Commonwealth (1977) 139 CLR 54, 88; Miller v. TCN Channel Nine Pty Ltd (1986)  

161 CLR 556, 582–3. See further Paul  Bickovskii, ‘No Deliberate Innovators: Mr Justice  

Murphy and the Australian Constitution’ (1977) 8 Federal Law Review 460.

93 

George Winterton, ‘Extra-Constitutional Notions in Australian Constitutional Law’ (1986) 16 

Federal Law Review  223;  Lisbeth  Campbell, ‘Lionel Murphy and the Jurisprudence of the 

High Court Ten Years on’ (1996) 15 University of Tasmania Law Review 22, 26; Bickovskii, 

Supra note 92, 460.

94 

See discussion in Jenny  Hocking,  Lionel Murphy: A Political Biography (Cambridge: 

 

Cambridge University Press, 1997).

95 

Cf Campbell, Supra note 93, 45 (on the rejection of the Murphy approach by Deane, Mason 

and others on the Mason Court.).

96 

(1986) 161 CLR 556, 579.

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Constitutional Implications in Australia 

365

could be made only where they were ‘logically or practically necessary for the 

preservation of the integrity’ of the structure from which they were derived.

97

In recent years, in affirming and applying various structural constitutional 

implications such as those recognised in Kable and ACTV, the Court has 

gone out of its way to emphasise the degree to which these implications are 

grounded in express provisions of the constitutional text. In the unanimous 

judgment in Lange, which restated the basis and nature of the implied free-

dom, the Court, now under the leadership of Sir Gerard Brennan, was careful 

to link it to concepts of representative and responsible government found in 

the text and structure of the Constitution, rather than more general (Murphy-

style) notions of representative democracy. Indeed, in Lange, many of the 

original members of the Court in ACTV joined the decision of the Court 

restating the ACTV principle, and emphasising the basis of the implied free-

dom in particular in the words of sections 7 and 24 of the Constitution, which 

provide for members of Parliament to be ‘directly chosen’ by the people. This 

move, George Williams and David Hume have postulated, can be explained 

as a response of the Court to the ‘activist’ criticism that was levelled at it fol-

lowing its earlier decisions, a shift in the composition and therefore interpreta-

tive orientation of the Court, a desire to create more certainty for the freedom 

and ‘to confer legitimacy on the exercise of the Court’s professed power to 

strike down legislation on the basis of an implication discerned 90 years after 

federation’.

98

Kable cases decided in the last decade have also reframed the doctrine by 

reference to the essential characteristics of a ‘court’, a term used in various 

provisions of Chapter III of the Constitution. In Forge v. Australian Securities 

and Investments Commission, Gummow, Hayne and Crennan JJ explained 

the Kable principle by reference to the requirement in Chapter III that the 

States retain ‘a body fitting the description of “the Supreme Court of a State”’, 

and that State ‘courts’ maintain ‘the defining characteristics of a “court”’.

99

 

The Court has explained that it is from these textual hooks that limiting con-

cepts such as ‘institutional integrity’ and ‘incompatibility’ arise.

The majority’s continued distancing of its rights-implication jurisprudence 

from the approach of Murphy J also arguably continued, or was at least rep-

licated, in its response to later attempts by Justice Michael Kirby to develop 

more expansive implied rights jurisprudence. Justice Kirby’s approach to con-

stitutional interpretation was very different from that of Murphy J. He spent 

97