EXECUTIVE AND LEGISLATIVE POWER IN THE IMPLEMENTATION OF INTERGOVERNMENTAL AGREEMENTS.

• Date: 01 April 2018
• Author: French, Robert

CONTENTS I Introduction II Federalism and the Need for Cooperation III Constitutional Provisions Requiring Intergovernmental Agreements IV The Use of Intergovernmental Agreements V The Commonwealth Is Not Just Another Person VI A Question for Reflection I Introduction

This is the second occasion on which I have had the honour of delivering the Sir Anthony Mason Lecture at Melbourne University Law School. I have sometimes complained about being asked to deliver lectures in honour of people who are still alive and well and particularly those who are younger than me. Sir Anthony is not younger than me but he is alive. He also appears considerably healthier than might be expected at his advanced age. Moreover, he shows all the intellectual energy and interest in the world of a considerably younger person. I make no complaint on that account nor about having been asked to carry out this task for a second time. He is a great Australian jurist and it is a pleasure to honour him again in this way.

My topic concerns intergovernmental agreements and the executive power of the Commonwealth, a subject on which Professor Cheryl Saunders of this university wrote what is probably still the leading paper in the Public Law Review in 2005. (1) I wondered to what extent recent developments in relation to executive power might have affected her principal observations. Upon re-reading the paper I am not sure that they have been affected or that recent developments have answered the unanswered questions which the paper raised.

At the heart of any discussion of Commonwealth executive power is s 61 of the Constitution, a not-so-limpid pool with highly reflective properties, which provides:

The executive power of the Commonwealth is vested in the Queen and is exercisable by the Governor-General as the Queen's representative, and extends to the execution and maintenance of this Constitution, and of the laws of the Commonwealth. Like some out-of-date sermoniser I begin by taking a text from the aging, but not yet old, testament of one of Sir Anthony's many significant judgments. It is a passage from R v Duncan; Ex parte Australian Iron & Steel Pty Ltd, (2) later quoted and approved by six Justices of the High Court in R v Hughes, (3) in which, speaking of the executive power of the Commonwealth, he said:

Of necessity the scope of the power is appropriate to that of a central executive government in a federation in which there is a distribution of legislative powers between the Parliaments of the constituent elements in the federation. It is beyond question that it extends to entry into governmental agreements between Commonwealth and [the] State[s] on matters of joint interest, including matters which require for their implementation joint legislative action, so long at any rate as the end to be achieved and the means by which it is to be achieved are consistent with and do not contravene the Constitution. (4) That passage was preceded by a reference to something that he had said in the AAP Case: namely, that the scope of the executive power is to be ascertained from the distribution of the legislative powers effected by the Constitution and the character and status of the Commonwealth as a national government. (5) Sir Anthony's observation may now have to be read subject to the new testament in relation to executive power, which is a work in progress, as indicated by the decisions of the High Court in Pape v Federal Commissioner of Taxation, (6) Williams v Commonwealth ('Williams [No 1]'), (7) Williams v Commonwealth [No 2] (8) and CPCF v Minister for Immigration and Border Protection. (9) Nevertheless, what he said frames my topic. It is appropriate to begin by referring to intergovernmental agreements as an incident of federalism.

II Federalism and the Need for Cooperation

Federal constitutions create systems of government in which governmental powers are distributed between a national government and sub-national governments. Each of the sub-national governments is responsible for a part of the national territory. Historically, the designers of federal constitutions have not always given close consideration to the operation of intergovernmental relationships beyond the formal rules set out in the constitutions. Thomas Hueglin and Alan Fenna in their recent book on comparative federalism have observed that '[intergovernmental relations ... as an ongoing and mostly informal practice in federal systems developed as a response to the much greater need for coordination than was originally envisaged'. (10)

Relevantly to Australia, they describe intergovernmental relations as driving 'modern federal systems as much as, or even more than, the formal constitutional set-up of divided powers and the bicameral legislative process'. (11) That does not mean that cooperative action was absent from the minds of the drafters of the Australian Constitution.

The drafting of the Australian Constitution and the creation of the Commonwealth were necessarily cooperative undertakings between the delegates to the Constitutional Conventions of the 1890s. The Constitution's provisions leave space for extensive intergovernmental cooperation. The existence of that space has been acknowledged repeatedly in the High Court. As Starke J said in 1939 in Moran's Case,

[c]o-operation on the part of the Commonwealth and the States may well achieve objects that neither alone could achieve; that is often the end and the advantage of co-operation. The court can and ought to do no more than inquire whether anything has been done that is beyond power or is forbidden by the Constitution. (12) Cooperation was characterised by Deane J in R v Duncan as 'a positive objective of the Constitution' (13) and as a necessity by Mason J in the passage quoted from his judgment in opening. (14)

Sir Harry Gibbs, as Chief Justice, used the term 'co-operative federalism' in R v Winneke; Ex parte Gallagher, holding that there was no constitutional impediment to a combined inquiry by the Commonwealth and the states into related subject matters. (15) The Chief Justice observed that it would be 'difficult to imagine why the Parliament would wish to forbid such a sensible exercise of co-operative federalism'. (16) And in Davis v Commonwealth, Mason CJ, Deane and Gaudron JJ held that the executive power of the Commonwealth extended to the commemoration of the bicentenary of Australia's colonisation, and acknowledged that the states had a part to play 'whether as part of an exercise in co-operative federalism or otherwise'. (17)

The term 'co-operative federalism', then, describes a class of activity which is a natural attribute of the operation of the Federation. It facilitates its functioning. An important mechanism for such cooperation is the intergovernmental agreement. One class of such agreement may lead to the exercise of Commonwealth legislative powers under provisions of the Constitution which, of their very nature, require the consent or agreement of the states. On one view, those provisions are textual indicators that the constitutional distribution of legislative powers is not inconsistent with the use of intergovernmental agreements to achieve nationwide administrative and legislative objectives beyond the scope of the Commonwealth or the states acting separately. That feature of the Constitution arguably informs the content of the executive power in relation to intergovernmental agreements--perhaps that element which has sometimes been called the 'nationhood power' or perhaps a subset of it which might be called a 'collaborative nationhood power'.

To the extent that the recent cases about executive power have arisen out of the unilateral exercise of that power by the Commonwealth, they do not provide complete answers to questions about the scope of the power in relation to multilateral agreements with the states.

III Constitutional Provisions Requiring Intergovernmental Agreements

There are a number of heads of legislative power conditioned, directly or indirectly, upon the consent or agreement of affected states. The Commonwealth Parliament can make laws for the acquisition of the railways of a state on terms arranged with the state. (18) It can also make laws with respect to railway construction and extension in any state with the consent of that state. (19) As a practical matter, some form of intergovernmental agreement is likely to be made anterior to the exercise of such power.

Another head of Commonwealth legislative power which requires state action to enliven it and, in practice, requires anterior agreement, is to be found in s 51(xxxvii) of the Constitution. Under that provision the Commonwealth Parliament may make laws with respect to matters referred to it by any state or states, but so that the law shall extend only to the states by whose parliaments the matter is referred, or which afterwards adopt the law. (20) Over the years there have been referrals and adoptions supporting a number of Commonwealth laws including laws providing for mutual recognition of occupational qualifications and product standards between states and territories, (21) corporations, (22) terrorism, (23) de facto relationships, (24) water (25) and personal property securities. (26) Referrals may be expressed broadly by reference to a subject matter on which the Commonwealth would thereby be authorised to...