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Anne Twomey

People Power: How Australian referendums are lost and won by George Williams and David Hume

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October 2024, no. 469
Anne Twomey reviews ‘People Power: How Australian referendums are lost and won’ by George Williams and David Hume

People have peculiar but passionate views about referendums. A large number swear that in 1974 and 1988 the people voted against referendums on the existence of local government. To them, local government is ‘unconstitutional’, so they don’t have to pay their council rates. Members of the same cohort also proclaim that they have a constitutional right to trial by jury for state criminal offences and a right to compensation on just terms if a state compulsorily acquires their land.

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Voiceless in Australia

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December 2023, no. 460
Anne Twomey on the future of the Voice to Parliament

Do you know whether Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are recognised in your state Constitution? If you responded with a mental shrug and a muttered ‘No idea’, then you would fall within the vast majority. In fact, from 2004 to 2016, each Australian state amended its Constitution to insert recognition of their Indigenous peoples. Yet the effect has been negligible and hardly anyone knows it happened. Why?

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The Veiled Sceptre: Reserve powers of heads of state in Westminster systems by Anne Twomey

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September 2018, no. 404
Stephen Murray reviews 'The Veiled Sceptre: Reserve powers of heads of state in Westminster systems' by Anne Twomey

The first season of Netflix’s drama The Crown sees the young Princess Elizabeth’s constitutional education taken in hand by Eton history master Henry Marten, whose schooling of the future monarch was largely historical rather than legal, a necessity given Britain’s ...

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