Australian Parliament

There are 4 main functions in Australian Parliament :

1. Law making

On daily basis, Australian Parliament makes new laws, change and improve old one on behalf of the Australian people. In other words, Parliament has the ultimate power and the highest law-making authority in Australia.

2. Representation

The Parliament represents the views, values, concerns, demands and interests of Australian citizens, parties and other groups. In a representative government, the people can have a lot of power over what the government does. They can put pressure on the government to change a law, so that the law says what the people think it should say. If the government does not perform what would public expect and satisfaction, at election time, public might dismiss the government.

3. Formation of government

The federal parliament is a bi-cameral. This means they consist of two houses and the crown. The two houses are House of Representative or the Lower House and the Senate or the Upper House. The government is formed by the parliaments which has majority elected in the House of Representative from the party (or coalition of parties).

4. Scrutiny

The Parliament examines the work of executive government, especially how its spending of public money. The laws and other decision of the Parliament has to be implemented by the government or executive. Parliament always monitoring or scrutinize what government does in daily basis, especially how government spends money. The Executive government has to obtain an approval and agreement from both houses of the Parliament in order to make major decisions, create new laws and spending money. The opposition plays an important part in the scrutiny activities of Parliament.

While the Courts play two main roles in the legal system. These are firstly, to interpret the statute law and regulations and make rulings for them to be enforced, and secondly to create precedents that will be followed in lower courts. Courts don't make law, the legislature does. Courts interpret law, and the supreme court decides whether or not its constitutional. But as for actual law making, the courts have absolutely no part in it. Courts (especially higher courts) hear cases which may have elements that are unusual, and require interpretation and elaboration on the principles in legislation. Once a court makes a judgment on one of these cases, there ruling becomes a precedent which will be followed (except in a few exceptional circumstances) by all lower courts on materially similar facts (that is cases with no major differences.) These precedents evolve over time and create the common law principles that are an important part of the legal system.