Australia celebrated the centenary of Federation in 2001. The year 2003 marks the centenary of the High Court of Australia, which first sat on 6 October 1903 in Melbourne. The Commonwealth Constitution continues to flourish after more than a century as the founding document of the Australian federation; as J. A. La Nauze observed, Australians can ‘claim citizenship of one of the most venerable federations of the world’. He also remarked that Australia, together with the United States, Switzerland and Canada, were the four federations whose constitutions were framed and adopted before the end of the nineteenth century and which ‘have, so far, survived’.

That the Australian polity has not only survived but has evolved into a prosperous independent liberal democratic nation is all the more remarkable given that the Constitution appears to be a ‘dull, remote and incomprehensible document’ which ‘seems to have no connection with life as it is actually lived’. Colin Howard, however, considered first appearances ‘misleading’, remarking that ‘[t]he Constitution has everything to do with life as it is actually lived in Australia’. An exception must, of course, be made for Chapter II, dealing with the Executive, which on its face suggests that the Governor-General runs the Commonwealth Government with the assistance of ‘the Queen's Ministers of State’.

The deceptively simple words of the Constitution have provided the battleground for a number of major constitutional controversies in Australia.