Lisa Burton Crawford

Recent decisions of the United States Supreme Court (SCOTUS) seem to have thrown the administrative state into crisis. A suite of recent cases have limited executive power in important ways—for example, by requiring executive action to be authorised by far more detailed legislation than has previously been required, or preventing executive agencies from performing certain functions that they have been allowed to in the past. These include the momentous decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v Raimondo, 603 US ___ (2024) — in which the SCOTUS effectively overturned the doctrine of Chevron deference.

Why should Australian public lawyers be interested in these developments? What light do they cast on our own legal system, and its particular strengths and pathologies? This post explores these issues, beginning with the complex legislative framework that sustains administrative government here.

Samuel White

In January 2020, the Prime Minister of Australia announced that the Australian Defence Force (ADF) would move from ‘respond to request’ to ‘move forward and integrate’, signalling increased domestic deployments in response to the devastating bushfires over the summer of 2019/2020. Two months later, Operation COVID-19 Assist was established and constituted the largest deployment – domestic or external - of the ADF since World War Two.