The Australian Constitution contains no aspirational statements of national possibility or sweeping vision of collective virtue, but the founders did not intend the Constitution’s meaning to remain fixed. It was to function as a prism of our national self-understanding, and its elaboration and development should aim, in the words of Alfred Deakin, to ‘enable the past to join the future, without undue collision and strife in the present’.
Conversations With The Constitution: Not Just A Piece Of Paper by Greg Craven
UNSW Press, $34.95pb, 250pp
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