Transparency and Rule-Making in Australia

[Extract] The absence at common law of an obligation of rule-makers to consult before making rules, or even to publish the rules, leaves any attempt to secure transparency in rule-making in Australia to statutory intervention. Statute has traditionally played an important but limited part.In Australia formal statutory requirements for the making of delegated legislation have followed the Westminster tradition. When rules of a legislative character, or delegated legislation, are made, they must be notified in the government gazette, scrutinised by a parliamentary committee, tabled in parliament with the potential for disallowance, and published in a formal manner. These requirements are set out in federal, State and Territory interpretation statutes. They achieve only a basic degree of transparency.The interpretation statutes have not traditionally provided for public notification in advance of the making of a proposed rule, or consultation with individuals or groups whose interests it affects. Requirements for consultation have featured in particular statutes, typically those regulating planning or the environment, but there was no general statutory requirement for consultation in rule-making, such as the notice and comment requirements in the United States.This paper traces the genesis of general statutory requirements in Australia for notice and consultation in rule-making, occurring at the State level, with a view to understanding the current federal general provision relating to notice and consultation. Attention will be given to the link, if any, between general requirements for notice and consultation, and requirements for regulatory impact assessment, whether statutory or informal. In the background is the consideration that the omission of a genuine consultation component in rule making processes may impair not only the democratic good of participation in government decision-making but also the effectiveness of regulatory impact assessment.

Automated Decision-Making and Review of Administrative Decisions

The use of automated decision-making (ADM) carries an enhanced risk of failure to meet administrative law standards. This Article identifies Australian federal statutory schemes for ADM and instances of non-statutory use of ADM, with a view to evaluating the scope for the risk to be realized. Express provisions for correction of error, internal review avenues, and external review by tribunals and courts may not deliver satisfactory solutions. Despite a promising start, review and reform of the regulation of ADM use has lagged. However, in 2023, the Report of the Royal Commission into Robodebt gave the issue renewed impetus, recommending statutory frameworks for ADM and independent monitoring. That was so notwithstanding that the damage done by Robodebt in raising overpayment debts against social security recipients, which resulted not from ADM per se, but from the encoding of an unlawful policy into the ADM system. The failure to meet administrative law standards was a deliberate and persistent product of human agency. This indicates that reform consisting of reviewing and monitoring the use of ADM needs to be capable of exposing such errors

Freedom of Information Legislation in Australia: A Review

Freedom of information legislation was introduced at the federal level in Australia in enactment of the Freedom of Information Act 1982 (“FOI Act”). Within the decade that followed, freedom of information legislation was introduced in each State and Territory in Australia, substantially based on the original model of the federal FOI Act.[if !supportFootnotes]. The federal and New South Wales (“NSW”) legislation underwent substantial changes in 2009 to 2010. In May 2013, the federal Attorney-General announced that Australia had joined the Open Government Partnership (“OGP”). After a change of government, Australia’s commitment to the OGP was not progressed. In November 2015 after a change of Prime Minister, the new Prime Minister stated that Australia remained committed to the OGP. However, Australia failed to provide a national action plan for three plan cycles, from 2014 to 2016

Disqualification for Bias and International Tribunals: Room for a Common Test

This Article explores the scope for the development of a bias test applying to international tribunals. In the absence of a developed test in any such tribunal, an obvious source of jurisprudence is the case-law on Article 6(1) of the European Convention, which the European Court of Human Rights applies to domestic tribunals of member states. The requirement of impartiality in Article 6(1) has remained an abstract concept, slowly evolving on the foundation of common law maxims accepted as its rationale. While United Kingdom courts claim that their recent renovation of the common law test of apparent bias is the result of the vertical effect of Article 6(1) jurisprudence, the influence appears to be in the reverse direction. By contrast, the United States constitutional and statutory tests of bias United States make no claim to influence or be influenced by Article 6(1), yet draw upon the same common law maxims. The ground shared by the bias tests under Article 6(1), in the United Kingdom and the United States, suggests the potential for development of a global test

Near Field Electron Ptychography

Phase imaging in the Transmission Electron Microscope (TEM) has a long history, from the implementation of off-axis holography in TEM to Differential Phase Contrast (DPC) on the Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopy (STEM). The advent of modern computing has enabled the development of iterative algorithms which attempt to recover a phase image of a specimen from measurements of the way it diffracts an incident electron beam. One of the most successful of these iterative methods is focused probe ptychography, which relies on far field diffraction pattern measurements recorded as the incident beam is scanned through a grid of locations across the specimen. Focused probe ptychography implemented in the STEM has provided the highest resolution images available to date, allows for lens-less setups avoiding the aberrations typical in older STEMs and allows for simultaneous reconstruction of the illumination and specimen. Ptychography is computationally flexible (highly constrained), allowing for additional unknowns other than the phase of the specimen to be recovered, for example positions can be refined during reconstruction. Near field ptychography is a recent variation on ptychography that replaces the far-field diffraction data with diffraction patterns recorded in the near field, or Fresnel, region. It promises to obtain a much larger field of view with fewer diffraction patterns than focused probe ptychography. The main contribution of this thesis is the implementation of a new form of near field ptychography on the Transmission Electron Microscope (TEM), using an etched silicon nitride window to structure the electron beam. Proof-of-concept results show the method quantitatively recovers megapixel phase images from as few as 9 recorded diffraction patterns, compared to many hundreds of diffraction patterns required for focused probe ptychography. Additional sets of results show how near-field ptychography can recover extremely large fields of view, deal effectively with inelastic scattering, and accommodate several sources of uncertainty in the experimental process. Further contributions in the thesis include: experiments and results from visible-light versions of near field ptychography, which explain its limitations and practical application; a description and code for analysis tools that are used to assess phase imaging performance; DigitalMicrograph (DM) code and a data collection workflow to realise TEM-based near-field ptychography; details of the design, realisation and performance of the etched silicon nitride windows; and simulation studies aimed at furthering understanding of the frequency response of the technique. Future work is outlined, focusing on potential applications in a wide range of real-world specimens and improved TEM setups to implement near field ptychography

Magnetic Phase Imaging using Lorentz Near-field Electron Ptychography

Over the past few years, the combination of diffuser and near-field electron ptychography has drawn more attention by its ability to recover large field of view with few diffraction patterns. In this paper, we purpose a novel design and implementation of amplitude diffuser. The amplitude diffuser introduces structures to the illumination while reducing the inelastic scattering. And the amplitude diffuser is implemented at the condenser lens aperture, allowing us to vary the illumination size under the same microscope setup. We demonstrate the reconstruction results under both conventional Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) mode as well as Lorentz mode.Comment: Presented in ISCS2

Contract for Work (locatio conductio operis) of Transportation and Rustic Praedial Servitude of Way (servitus viae) as Roman Law Institutions for Needs of Rural Logistics

The article deals with the results of the authors’ research performed on original sources of Roman Law with reference to legal constructions concerning various types of logistics challenges related to agricultural production and residence in rural areas. Provision of transportation services was regulated by means of a contract for work (locatio conductio operis) – an agreement according to which a contractor / employee as a lessee (conductor, redemptor operis) had obligations to fulfil services or certain work on or from the material supplied by the commissioning party / employer / lessor (locator). An agreement on transportation of goods or passengers was also considered to be a contract for work. A smart answer to infrastructure challenges was the so-called rustic praedial servitudes (servitutes praediorum rusticorum), including a servitude of way / road (via), which granted the owner of a parcel of land non-adjacent to a public road (via publica) the right to use the road over a parcel of land belonging to another owner, thus gaining access to the public road. The legal framework of a Roman contract for work of transportation and the rustic praedial servitude of way / road must be recognised as a rather effective solution for challenges of rural logistics at the time

Depth of field of multi‐slice electron ptychography: investigating energy and convergence angle

Multi‐slice electron ptychography has attracted significant interest in recent years, thanks to notable experimental successes in ultra‐high resolution, depth‐resolved imaging of atomic structure. However, the theoretical dependence of depth of field on experimental parameters is not well understood. In this paper we use simulated data to compare the depth of field of through focal annular‐dark field and multi‐slice electron ptychography over a range of acceleration voltages and convergence angles. We show that at both low convergence angle and at low electron energy, multi‐slice ptychography has significantly improved depth of field over through focal ADF imaging

Efficient large field of view electron phase imaging using near-field electron ptychography with a diffuser

Most implementations of ptychography on the electron microscope operate in scanning transmission (STEM) mode, where a small focussed probe beam is rapidly scanned across the sample. In this paper we introduce a different approach based on near-field ptychography, where the focussed beam is replaced by a wide-field, structured illumination, realised through a purpose-designed etched Silicon Nitride window. We show that fields of view as large as 100 μm2 can be imaged using the new approach, and that quantitative electron phase images can be reconstructed from as few as nine near-field diffraction pattern measurements