Julian R Murphy

The High Court’s decision in Ravbar v Commonwealth [2025] HCA 25 raises a number very large questions, including as to proportionality testing in different fields of constitutional law, ‘reading down’ constitutional purposes, and the constraints of precedent on a single Justice of the High Court. In amongst those headline matters one might easily overlook another issue that divided members of the Court – the relevance of private communications to the interpretation, and judicial review, of legislation. This issue might seem niche, but the use of private documents in legislative deliberation is in fact relatively common.