Earlier this month Sir Anthony Mason presented the 21st annual lecture named in his honour at Melbourne Law School and hosted by the Law Students’ Society.

Sir Anthony offered a commentary on contemporary High Court jurisprudence on the relevance of the concept of proportionality in administrative and constitutional law. His focus was on the recent cases of Li, Monis, Unions NSW and Tajjour, which Sir Anthony presented as offering competing perspectives on the place and test for proportionality in Australian law. Sir Anthony did, however, reflect on some of the cases he was involved in from which he traced an historic attention to proportionality by the High Court. These cases included the bicentennial case, Davis v Commonwealth and the refillable bottle case, Castlemaine Tooheys.

Sir Anthony argued that Li represented “a more positive attitude to the use of proportionality” among this Court than past, and he seemingly endorsed the use of proportionality in judicial review to soften the extremely strict standard of Wednesbury unreasonableness.

On the constitutional law freedom of political communication cases of Monis, Unions NSW and Tajjour, Sir Anthony articulated three emergent approaches to proportionality. From Monis, he described Kiefel, Crennan and Bell JJ as grounding an extensive proportionality test (so called ‘structural proportionality’) from European developments. He also distilled competing limited proportionality tests by Gagelar J in Tajjour and by Keane J in the Unions NSW case that would reshape the Lange test for validity of laws that impede political communication if they were to be embraced by the court. As readers of the blog will know from the analysis of Professor Adrienne Stone, how the court resolves its grappling with proportionality might bring clarity to the extent and character of the Australian constitutional freedom of political communication.

A video recording of the lecture can be viewed online.