States' Rights in Australia

It seems it took Australian centralist only 80 years to destroy the concept of States' Rights - that would parallel US History.

The constitution was drafted to establish strong states to work with a weaker central government. This held true for the first two decades of our Federation as the High Court favoured state power and protected state responsibility over areas such as industrial relations.

For the states, the WorkChoices case was lost as far back as 1920. In that year the High Court in the engineers case swept aside the earlier decisions and discarded any idea of a balance between federal and state power. The idea of "federal balance", like "states rights", became a constitutional heresy. Today, they are nothing more than political slogans. Read More...