The Forgotten Founding

Abstract

The Australian founding seems to be little understood and of little consequence for most Australians. To address this problem of the ‘forgotten founding’, extensive civics education programs have been proposed and implemented. The paper argues that these civics programs need to engage an underlying cause of this problem: the tension between the two traditions — the common law and liberal constitutionalism — that have shaped Australia. In delineating the nature of this tension, the paper argues that a dominant common law tradition, which locates the ultimate constitutional authority in the common law and not the people, has depreciated the founding, divided scholarship into the legal and the political, and thereby constrained the study of Australian constitutionalism.