Sir Isaac Isaacs, with reinforcement from H. B. Higgins, both alumni of the
Constitutional Conventions, former attorneys-general of the Commonwealth
(in the second Deakin and Watson Labor governments respectively), and, by
1920,fifteen-year veterans of the Court.
Prior toEngineers’the Constitution was viewed as a compact among the
states and the Commonwealth, and cases were settled in a manner which
sought to respect the various jurisdictions. This approach, however, became
somewhat tangled, and that allowed Menzies to argue successfully that the
Court should take a fresh look. This provided the opportunity for Isaacs and
Higgins, both clearly more centralist than federalist, to introduce a doctrine
based on conventional methods of statutory construction. This approach
thereafter allowed Commonwealth powers to take full effect, leaving only
residual powers for the state governments.
As it happens, this centralist view of the Constitution was given much
support politically after the 1922 election, at which the Nationalist Party,
led by William Morris Hughes, lost its majority in the House of Representa-
tives. In the Coalition government which succeeded the Hughes government,
the two leadingfigures were veterans of the Great War, S. M. Bruce and
Dr Earle Page, neither of whom had been members of the Constitutional
Conventions, nor of any state parliament. Bruce had strong connections
with Melbourne but had mainly lived in Britain; Page, a founding member
of the Country Party, had links with rural Australia rather than the city. It was,
indeed, a new generation and not one directly involved in the design of the
Federation.
Engineers’has been the lodestone of constitutional interpretation ever
since. Judicial interpretation has been a major avenue for enhancement of
Commonwealth powers and the progressive shift of the states from autonomy
to agency.
The path has been similar in history. So far as Australia itself is concerned,
the big theme is the ascendancy of the Commonwealth. Augmentation of the
Commonwealth role is invariably portrayed as an indisputable and laudable
sign of progress. Expansion of the Commonwealth role at home is matched by
Australia’s assertion of itself internationally. Intersection of the two, and
exploitation of its international role to advance Commonwealth interests at
home, has been much admired. Few reservations were expressed as the Com-
monwealth increasingly utilized the so-called external affairs power in the
Constitution, section 51 (xxix), as a constitutional head of power for aggrand-
isement in, for example, theTasmanian Dams case, the case in 1983 in which
plans of the government of Tasmania to dam the Franklin River in south-west
Tasmania were stopped. The counsel of Sir Harry Gibbs, a justice of the High
Court from 1971 until 1981, and Chief Justice from then until his compulsory
retirement in 1987, that the nation might just as well delete‘External affairs’
Australia’s‘Talent for Bureaucracy’