The People's Guide to the Australian Constitution

Everything you need to know about the Australian Constitution – its past, present and future. The People’ s Guide to the Australian Constitution illustrates how, far from being an unchangeable, technical legal contract, the Australian Constitution gives people the power to participate in and decide the shape of government and the policies it adopts. Leading legal academics Rosalind Dixon and William Partlett shed light on what Governor-General John Kerr did not acknowledge about the Constitution when he dismissed the Whitlam government, the tension between Australia’ s Christian settler-colonial constitutional identity and the recognition of First Nations peoples, the advantages and risks of constitutional change and much more. At almost 125 years old, Australia’ s Constitution is one of the oldest in the world, and while this has brought stability, it also gives the Australian people an opportunity to participate in adapting it to changing times.

William Partlett is Associate Professor at the University of Melbourne Law School and Co-Director of its Centre for Comparative Constitutional Studies. He is also the Stephen Charles Fellow at the Centre for Public Integrity. Beyond his academic publications, Partlett has written extensively about constitutions for popular audiences in The Conversation, The National Interest, Pursuit, Crikey, and The Age. Rosalind Dixon is a Professor of Law at UNSW Sydney, and former assistant professor at the University of Chicago, and visiting professor at Harvard Law, Columbia Law and Chicago Law Schools. She is also former co-president of the International Society of Public Law, and the author of two leading academic books on constitutional democracy, Abusive Constitutional Borrowing: Legal Globalization and the Subversion of Liberal Democracy (OUP 2021) (with David Landau) and Responsive Judicial Review: Democracy and Dysfunction in the Modern Age (OUP 2023).

1. Introduction 2. How does our constitution work? 3. Is our constitutional system democratic? 4. How many levels of government do we have? 5. What are our constitutional values? 6. Do we have constitutional rights? 7. Who protects our constitutional system? 8. How does our constitutional system change?