Overview

This project aims to provide comprehensive free access online to the reports of all royal commissions and other public inquiries held in Australia since Federation. The project intends to support a wide understanding of the pivotal role public inquiries play in the development of Australian law and public policy. It is expected that these reports will be comprehensively integrated with all other legislation, case law and law reform reports on AustLII to promote a greater understanding of how the balance is struck between inquisitorial fact-finding and the right to procedural fairness of participants and of how justice is delivered through the inquiry function of public bodies.

This project's objectives include:

• Building new interfaces on AustLII to incorporate all elements of the project .
• Identifying and locating online resources that have been created or that exist in a digital format, and downloading these resources and capturing relevant metadata to enable integration into the AustLII ‘ecosystem’.
• Working with the National Library of Australia, State libraries, parliamentary, court and university libraries to identify and secure access to already digitised historical resources and to digitise historical resources that are not available in digital form.
• Integrating AustLII’s current collections of Law Reform, Ombudsman reports etc. and securing re-publication access to those not already included.
• Developing and automatically including citations for all reports, decisions, findings and other resources added to AustLII databases (and citations found within them) in AustLII’s LawCite citator, which will both make them more useful and create capacity for statistical data and other metric analysis.
• Developing new citation and analytical functions as well as enhancing existing tools, which will utilise the newly added data to facilitate development of new forms of law research by CIs and other researchers.

Fields of research

Administrative Law, Legal Institutions. 

Chief Investigators

CURTIN UNIVERSITY

Professor Robert Cunningham

DEAKIN UNIVERSITY

Professor Matthew Groves

MONASH UNIVERSITY 

Associate Professor Luke Beck

THE AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY

Dr Dominique Dalla-Pozza

THE UNIVERSITY OF ADELAIDE

Professor Gregory Taylor

THE UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE

Dr Tanya Josev

THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW ENGLAND

Professor Mark Lunney

THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES

Dr Gabrielle Appleby

Associate Professor Philip Chung

THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY

Associate Professor Andrew Edgar

THE UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY SYDNEY

Professor Thalia Anthony

Professor Andrew Mowbray

Professor Anita Stuhmcke

THE UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND

Dr Vicky Comino

THE UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA

Dr Murray Wesson

Project start

2021

Project status

Active