Australian Criminal Law - Law Reform and The Model Criminal Code

Law Reform and The Model Criminal Code

There are currently plans within some states of Australia to reform the criminal law to achieve greater consistency between states, through the Model Criminal Code. However, as criminal law is not a power permitted under the Australian Constitution that the Federal Government can legislate on, the Model Criminal Code is simply a model that individual states may choose to adapt to their own criminal laws.

At present, New South Wales, Western Australia and the Northern Territory have participated in modifying some crimes to match the position in the model criminal code, but in many areas states have not changed laws to reflect this code, and in some instances reject the code entirely.

Read more about this topic:  Australian Criminal Law

Famous quotes containing the words law, reform, model, criminal and/or code:

    Will mankind never learn that policy is not morality,—that it never secures any moral right, but considers merely what is expedient? chooses the available candidate,—who is invariably the devil,—and what right have his constituents to be surprised, because the devil does not behave like an angel of light? What is wanted is men, not of policy, but of probity,—who recognize a higher law than the Constitution, or the decision of the majority.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    All reform aims, in some one particular, to let the soul have its way through us; in other words, to engage us to obey.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    It has to be acknowledged that in capitalist society, with its herds of hippies, originality has become a sort of fringe benefit, a mere convention, accepted obsolescence, the Beatnik model being turned in for the Hippie model, as though strangely obedient to capitalist laws of marketing.
    Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)

    If we are on the outside, we assume a conspiracy is the perfect working of a scheme. Silent nameless men with unadorned hearts. A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It’s the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a logic and a daring beyond our reach. All conspiracies are the same taut story of men who find coherence in some criminal act.
    Don Delillo (b. 1926)

    ...I had grown up in a world that was dominated by immature age. Not by vigorous immaturity, but by immaturity that was old and tired and prudent, that loved ritual and rubric, and was utterly wanting in curiosity about the new and the strange. Its era has passed away, and the world it made has crumbled around us. Its finest creation, a code of manners, has been ridiculed and discarded.
    Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945)