Australian Consitution

Having been created over 100 years ago, it has been suggested that the Australian Constitution has passed its use by date. This essay aims to explore whether or not the Australian constitution is still relevant for application in the twenty first century. This will be achieved by investigating both the current short falls of the constitution, including the need for the constitution to better reflect the current political and government systems, the inclusion of human rights provisions, updates to include specific technological advancements and a reformed process of changing the constitution itself. This paper will also outline some disadvantages and difficulties associated with reform, including problems associated with who would detail the changes, how the changes could be adopted given the current process for constitutional change and how to overcome the fear of change within the Australian public. Due to word constraints, this paper will only provide a brief introduction to constitutional reform, and does not intend to provide a detailed insight into the topic.

According to Jaensch (1997, p. 44) “a constitution is a means to arrang

Perhaps the greatest challenge within the issue of constitutional reform is the task of deciding what needs to be changed, and how those changes will be worded as well as who gets to make those decisions. If it obviously near impossible to include every Australian in the writing of a reform and so delegates must be appointed. To allow the current government to draft the changes would also cause controversy. Whoever are selected to draft the proposals need to be impartial in relation to party politics, as well as well-respected and trusted by the people of Australia. In addition to this, the candidates would also need to be fully educated on the subject. Even if the right people could be chosen to perform the required tasks, their recommendations would then need to be passed through both houses of Parliament, a task unto itself. Furthering this, the changes would then of course need to be put to referendum and with a referendum success rate of just over 18% that would be unlikely.

Overcoming the ignorance of people toward the constitution, and indeed the whole system of Australia polity is a hurdle that must be addressed before constitutional reform has any real chance of succeeding. Better education of the general public is the only way that this can be achieved. Whilst political studies are now a core requirement within the education system, this was not so a few years ago, and so the people of those generations perhaps do not have the same critical understanding of both the current systems and policies and the need for reform.

Within the Australian constitution, limited provision is made for the protection of human rights. Therefore, it is possible for rights to be abused and denied. Internationally, human rights have been included either within the countries constitution, as in the case of Switzerland, or within a subsidiary Bill of Rights, as in the United States of America. Whilst in the Australian constitution there is provision for freedom of speech, freedom of political expression, including the right to protest and run for parliament, and freedom of religion there is no mention of basic human rights like the access to food, shelter, clothing, social welfare payments or medical attention and no provision is made for protecting individuals from cruel and brutal punishment or other such offences. This leaves these rights to being mere assumptions, and whilst law protects most, it is possible for those laws to be changed. W

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