Unfinished Business: Confirming Australia's Constitution as an Act of Political Settlement

This paper sympathises with both conservatives who oppose continual tampering with the Constitution and progressive reformers wishing to improve its democratic character. It suggests a constitutional reconciliation between the two is feasible if both take more account of the position advanced by federal constitutionalists. Such a reconciliation would leave the mainframe of the Constitution intact and establish it more securely as an authoritative framework for political association. Doing so would also resolve much of the normative confusion surrounding the polity, help establish a more coherent philosophy of government in Australia, and subsume the translation to a republic.     

Resistance to alien rule in Taiwan and Korea†

ABSTRACT. Although alien rule is widely assumed to be illegitimate, nationalist resistance to it varies across time and space. This article explores why there was greater nationalist resistance to Japanese colonial rule in Korea than Taiwan from the turn of the twentieth century to the end of World War II. Resistance to alien rulers requires both a supply of participants in nationalist collective action and a demand for national self‐determination. The article assesses two principal propositions: (1) that the supply of participants increases to the degree that native elites are stripped of their traditional authority and offered few incentives to collaborate; and (2) that the demand for national self‐determination decreases to the degree that alien rule is fair and effective. A comparative analysis of the effects of Japanese alien rule in Taiwan and Korea suggests that nationalist resistance is greater in the earliest phases of occupation, that the greater native elites' opportunities, the weaker the resistance to alien rule; and that the fairer the governance, the weaker the resistance to alien rule.     

The Mandate and Responsible Government

This paper discusses mandate doctrine against the background of both recent empirical research and controversy surrounding the term in Australia. It defends the concept as a normative term which belongs with the responsible party model and consent theory. It further concludes that the Democrats' claim to enjoy a mandate equal to that of the coalition government is not justified from the perspective of responsible government. However, Senator Kernot's position marks another step in the constitutional evolution of the Senate. Final judgment on the meaning of mandate depends on what kind of polity emerges.