ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Australia's constitutional rights to closer scrutiny. It shows that how the High Court can pursue rights protection through the use of rights-sensitive interpretive devices and judicially created rules for the application of constitutional provisions. The chapter examines the claim that Australia's constitutional rights are an especially weak form of protecting rights. It argues that a system of rights protection that depends so heavily on the implication of rights, on the incorporation of rights from extra-constitutional sources and other judicially created rules of constitutional law, is inevitably weak. The chapter illustrates that how the Australian Constitution has been interpreted to protect rights. It identifies that why the Australian Constitution has proved to be an especially weak mechanism for the protection of rights. The chapter locates the source of that weakness in the interpretive controversy that inevitably attends rights-protective readings of a constitution that, in textual and historical terms, is so inhospitable to rights.
