When parliament has nowhere to turn

The category can change. The claimed power remains the same.

History suggests that political communities are rarely united on the question of who should be excluded. Views differ across generations, parties and circumstances. The safeguard against arbitrary exclusion is therefore not the popularity of the group affected. The safeguard is the existence of a constitutional limit that government cannot cross.

If no source of power can be identified, and if the institutions responsible for identifying that source refuse to do so, Australia confronts an unsettling possibility. Parliament may be exercising one of the most profound powers imaginable, the power to determine who belongs to the Australian people, without ever demonstrating where that power comes from.

That is the real question confronting Australia.

Not who Parliament chooses to exclude today, but how Parliament acquired the power to exclude at all.

And if neither Parliament, nor the Executive, nor the High Court will answer that question, where does Parliament turn now?