What Do Australians Talk About When They Talk About“Parliamentary Sovereignty”?

Abstract

It is commonly said that some form of parliamentary sovereignty or parliamentary supremacy is part of Australian constitutional law. Yet no Australian legislature has “the right to make or unmake any law whatsoever” and Australian courts are “recognised by the law as having a right to override or set aside the legislation of Parliament”. So what do Australians talk about when they talk about parliamentary sovereignty? The article draws on a comprehensive review of the Australian literature to identify four possible explanations of what Australians mean when they invoke parliamentary sovereignty or parliamentary supremacy. The article argues that references to parliamentary sovereignty and parliamentary supremacy in the Australian context either cannot stand, need not stand, or do not helpfully stand, as efforts to explain Australian public law. This article argues there is no legislature on the Australian continent that should be described in terms of “sovereignty” or “supremacy”, and that those terms should be discarded from the literature. Reliance on parliamentary sovereignty and parliamentary supremacy in Australia is reliance on an inaccurate, inadequate, or unnecessary simile. Show more