Janina Boughey

Anyone who has worked in a government department for more than a brief period knows how much ministers differ in their interest in their portfolio, diligence, and competence. The best ones (from a departmental staffer’s perspective, at least) are efficient, yet seem to be across all of the important details, which they might demonstrate by asking pointed questions which raise issues the department may not have considered. Others are quick, but one gets a sense that they might not have really engaged with issues in their portfolio—that they are simply doing a ‘tick and flick’. They might, for instance, require all briefings to be less than a page long which, on complex policy issues, means leaving out important details and nuances. Then there are ministers who pore laboriously over every detail of even the most mundane, routine decisions.

Douglas McDonald-Norman

In order to determine whether a decision is affected by jurisdictional error, a court must ask two questions. Has an error occurred, in breach of the statutory conferral of power to make that decision? And, if so, was that error material to the decision-maker’s ultimate exercise of power? For an error to be material, an applicant for review must establish that there is a realistic possibility that, if not for the error, the decision-maker’s ultimate exercise of power could have been different.

Yee-Fui Ng

The Kerr Committee’s vision for a new administrative justice system led to the ground-breaking introduction of the ‘new administrative law’ package in the 1970s, incorporating the establishment of a generalist administrative tribunal, statutory judicial review, the office of the Commonwealth Ombudsman, and later, in the 1980s, freedom of information …