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The Final Report of the Referendum Council, which includes the Uluru Statement from the Heart, is a formal claim on the Australian people and its governing institutions. The claim is for a new conception of the unity of the Australian people so that for the first time historically it includes the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the first sovereign nations of Australia. This is the significance of the recommendation that a First Nations Voice to Parliament be established in the Australian Constitution. This is not just a claim on the Australian constitution; it is a claim in public law that offers a new political‐constitutional horizon of intelligibility for the Australian constitution. In the current reception of the Final Report, this has not been properly understood. The historical challenge and significance of the Final Report of the Referendum Council and the Uluru Statement from the Heart concerns the consensual assertion on the part of the First Nations of Australia of a formal claim in public law. The claim is that the Australian polity and institutions of government be reconceived and changed so that they include rather than exclude the first sovereign nations of Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article originally was written in honour of the memory of Lord Cooke. At one level it seeks to identify the principal differences between judicial review in New Zealand and Australia and to explain how and why the Australian position is affected by the Australian Constitution. To this extent, the article also demonstrates that Australia is one of a growing number of states in which administrative law is constitutionalised to a significant degree, although in Australia this is a consequence of the organisation of public power, rather than the product of a right to administrative justice. More fundamentally, however, the article uses a comparison of judicial review in New Zealand and Australia as a case study through which to explore several themes in comparative public law. On the face of it, New Zealand and Australia are similar countries with broadly similar systems of public law that might be expected to converge further, given the close links between them and the effects of globalisation. In fact, however, their systems of judicial review have diverged, in matters of important detail, in response to contextual differences between the two countries, of which the Australian Constitution is only one. The article notes that this development in turn has implications for the methodology of the citation of foreign law in administrative law cases, although it should not affect the practice itself, which has enriched the law in both countries and should continue to do so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]