In the US it sometimes feels like the biggest cases come down to whatever the current majority of the supreme court thinks - how much they value precedent, how they interpret language from earlier ages including in the constitution, how much they weigh effects on political or economic stability, how much they value the respect the court has, etc...
What is Australia's final decider and does it periodically have great upheavals in how things are ruled on and what might get revisited? Do you have a favorite case where they made a decision that was controversial?
The Hight Court of Australia is the supreme constitutional and common law court of Australia. (So structurally it is similar to the Canadian Supreme Court and different from the US Supreme Court.)
Legal culture and judicial politics in Australia are very different from what they are in the US.
A recent controversial case in Australia was
Love; Thoms. The case concerned the constitutional power to make laws with respect to aliens - that is the constitutional power on which Australian migration and deportation law rests. The case held (roughly) that no Indigenous Australian person (ie who is a member of a First Nations community) can be considered an alien for constitutional purposes, and hence cannot be governed by deportation laws that depend for their validity upon the fact that those whom they target are aliens.
The government at the time of this decision was a conservative (Liberal and National Party) government. At the time that government lost office, in last year's election, there was actually a case on foot which was challenging the correctness of the decision - the composition of the bench had changed, and the government was hoping that a new majority might find that the decision was wrong, and hence overturn in.
The new (and current) government, which is a Labor Party (ie centre-left) government withdrew that case, and so the decision in Love stands.
Here is a list of how the judges decided in the case, and in brackets which party appointed them: when looking at the list, keep in mind the following four things: (i) in Australia, judges are appointed by the government of the day and there is no analogy to the US Senate hearings for federal judicial appointments; (ii) the Liberal Party of Australia is the predominant conservative party in the country; (iii) the majority decision was the one which held that the aliens power does
not reach to Indigenous people, whereas the minority held that whether or not Indigenous people can count as aliens is a matter for the Parliament to decide by way of legislation; (iv) it was a Liberal Party government that was challenging the correctness of the majority decision, and it was a Labour Party government that withdrew that challenge once it took office:
Kiefel CJ (minority; Liberal)
Bell J (majority; Labour)
Gageler J (minority; Labour)
Keane J (minority; Labour)
Nettle J (majority; Liberal)
Gordon J (majority; Liberal)
Edelman J (majority; Liberal)
That should give you a sufficient indication of the way in which Australia's legal culture and judicial politics are quite different from the US.
