Electronic product design engineering

The limits of jurisdiction: law, governance and Indigenous peoples in colonised Australia Mark Finnane Published in: Shaunnagh Dorsett and Ian Hunter (eds), Law and Politics in British Colonial Thought: Transpositions of Empire (Palgrave, 2010): pp. 149-168.
Finnane: Limits of jurisdiction 2The limits of jurisdiction: law, governance and Indigenous peoples in colonised Australia Mark Finnane In events well known and controversial in Australia, the last year of the Howard Government (1996-2007) saw a federal “intervention” in one of its own territories with the aim of restoring order in Aboriginal communities. Under the mandate of an “Emergency Response” the government designed a comprehensive program of policing (including military aid to the civil power), welfare reform and criminal law amendment. The response comprised both material and symbolic elements. Among the latter was a widely publicised announcement that “customary law” would no longer be an excuse for criminal behaviour. Some months later the Commonwealth Parliament amended the Crimes Act to delete a requirement passed only in 1994 (with bi-partisan support) that a court take account of “cultural background” in sentencing decisions. Today the Crimes Act directs that “a court must not take into account any form of customary law or cultural practice as a reason for: (a) excusing, justifying, authorising, requiring or lessening the seriousness of the criminal behaviour to which the offence relates; or (b) aggravating the seriousness of the criminal behaviour to which the offence relates.” 1Such a determined government attack on “customary law and cultural practice” more than two centuries after the British settlement of Australia prompts us to consider how such traces of Indigenous authority and even assertions of jurisdiction have survived. For it will be argued here that far from being resolved in 1836, the question of Indigenous amenability to imported British criminal law in Australia remained surprisingly open. Historians as well as jurists have generally agreed that when the New South Wales Supreme Court affirmed in the case of R v Jack Congo