The High Court has taken the view that the Keneally government anti bikie laws are invalid.

A link to the decision is here; http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/HCA/2011/24.html

As in the previous S.A. anti bikie law case in the High Court, His Honour Justice Heydon offered his dissenting opinion. But he appears to stand alone on this one. At the conclusion of his judgment he seems happy to throw out any suggestion of freedom of political association being implied in the Constitution. He seems to be happy to accept that just about any aspect of judicial procedure as it is understood to be, can be thrown out by legislation.

This may well be suggested by case law. And it highlights the basic problem of many English law legal systems, with perhaps the exception of the USA. It is all based on trust. If we accept that there is no implied freedom of association in the Constitution it would presumably be probably OK with Justice Heydon for the Labor party to be made illegal, or maybe not, since the Communist Party case in 50s put a stop to similar ideas back then. Perhaps it would all depend on whether some group or other was registered as a political party or not. Which doesn't seem to be a very profound way of dealing with the fundamental problem.

As the majority of the High Court found in this decision, the problem with the NSW legislation was that it attempts to dress up some very unjudicial procedures and give them the appearance of respectability by entrusting the decisions to Supreme Court judges. At the time when the S.A anti bikie laws were thrown out, the wise NSW Labor Government noted that their anti bikie laws were different and supposedly valid, because they used Supreme Court judges and not magistrates as the South Australian government had. Wrong again.

This case, and others, highlights many of the problems with the current Australian Constitution. It is devoid of many of the important political rights which can be found in, for example the US Constitution. The freedom of expression right, which the High Court had to imply in the Australian Constitution, would if Justice Heydon is correct, be a very narrow small right indeed.

As for the others, he would throw out anything about the right of association and probably a lot of other ones too. The Australian Constitution is badly in need of a reconstruction, but that will probably never happen, because the people who want to be able to do anything they feel like doing to the Australian people, are the ones who control all the access to the procedures for changing it.