When: 6 December 2021, 5:45pm
Where: Online via Zoom
The NSW Society of Labor Lawyers invites you to a briefing on whether, and to what extent, Australian federal and state relations have changed since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic with Senator Katy Gallagher and Professor Rosalind Dixon.
During the pandemic there has been a fundamental shift in power from the Commonwealth, which for the better part of two decades had been accumulating responsibility at the expense of the states, back to state governments who have taken charge of the public health response, including through quarantine, restrictions on movement and border closures. The webinar will consider state and federal responsibility during the pandemic, the use of state and federal emergency powers, state border politics, and the role of National Cabinet in the pandemic response. It will ask: has the pandemic permanently reshaped state and federal relations or is this newfound state power a blip on the greater trend toward a centralised federal government?
Senator Katy Gallagher is a Senator for the Australian Capital Territory from 2015 to 2018 and 2019 to present. Prior to entering the Senate, Senator Gallagher was the Chief Minister for the Australian Capital Territory from 2011 to 2014. She has been the Chair of the Senate Select Committee on COVID-19 since 9 April 2020 which inquired into the Australian Government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic and reported in December 2020 and February 2021 on, amongst other things, state and Commonwealth responsibilities for aspects of the pandemic response and the role of National Cabinet.
Professor Rosalind Dixon is a Professor of Law, at the University of New South Wales, Faculty of Law. She earned her BA and LLB from the University of New South Wales, and was an associate to the Chief Justice of Australia, the Hon. Murray Gleeson AC, before attending Harvard Law School, where she obtained an LLM and SJD. Her work focuses on comparative constitutional law and constitutional design, constitutional democracy, theories of constitutional dialogue and amendment, socio-economic rights and constitutional law and gender, and has been published in leading journals in the US, Canada, the UK and Australia. She has edited or co-edited numerous books and publications and is on the editorial board of the International Journal of Constitutional Law and Public Law Review. Professor Dixon is also a Co-Director of the Gilbert + Tobin Centre of Public Law Responding to COVID-19: Project on Public Law and Public Health.
This event will be hosted online via Zoom. A link to the webinar will be provided upon registration.