Tasmanian Dams and Australia's Relationship with International Law

Abstract

Tasmanian Dams remains a touchstone for the debate over Australia's relationship with international law because it entrenched an interplay between anxiety and promise at the heart of that relationship. This interplay arises from a tension between anxiety about the influence of international law in Australia, on the one hand, and the promises international law offers on the other. In this article, I show how the anxiety-promise dialectic has shaped Australia's relationship with international law since Tasmanian Dams in three contexts: treaty negotiations, the attitudes of State and federal parliamentarians to international law and the attitudes of international law academics to international law. I conclude that the dialectic has ultimately been unproductive for Australia's relationship with international law.