Judge not lest ye be judged: the trials of a model litigant

Under the "Legal Practice Guidelines on Values, Ethics and Conduct", the Australian Taxation Office ("ATO" as a Commonwealth agency is required to operate as a "Model Litigant", and to act "with complete propriety, fairly and in accordance with the highest professional standards" in litigation in which the ATO is involved. The Guidelines play an important role in promoting support for the rule of law and respect for the Australian Taxation Office and the tax system as a whole – key elements in promoting voluntary compliance with the self-assessment tax system. Appropriately, the Guidelines set "an extremely high bar to jump over", and the ATO has not always succeeded in satisfying these requirements. Two recent decisions of the Full Federal Court provide stark illustrations of ATO failures to comply with the Guideline requirements. In FC of T v Indooroopilly Childcare Services (Qld) Pty Ltd, the Court was extremely critical of the ATO's failure to follow a series of single judge Federal Court decisions, while in LVR (WA) v Administrative Appeals Tribunal, a differently constituted Court was critical of the failure by counsel for the ATO to advise the judge at first instance that the AAT’s reasons for its decision were almost wholly copied verbatim and without attribution from the Commissioner's submissions to the AAT. While no doubt lapses such as these do not reflect well on the ATO, they offer rich opportunities for analysis of multi-dimensional legal, policy and related issues. How tax teachers "frame" the analysis of such issues may influence the perception and values which students take with them into the real world. Accordingly, as intellectual gatekeepers and moral exemplars, legal academics owe a duty to their students and their profession to approach the analysis of these issues in a critical but balanced way

A Necessary Constraint on the Use of Extended Harmonic Analysis for Tide Predictions

When American and British tide researchers, in an effort to improve tide predictions for large-range shallow-water tides, greatly expanded the number of tide constituents (extended harmonic analysis), they chose the added frequencies by selecting peaks of energy greatly exceeding the continuum (noise level) in a high-resolution Fourier analysis of tide residuals (observed minus predicted). Unfortunately, some tide agencies are now routinely analyzing for a greatly expanded number of constituents without checking as to whether the amplitudes of these added constituents are significantly larger than the continuum. They do this believing that more is necessarily better; actually, in some cases, a future prediction may be worse unless this check is done routinely

The Evolution of Modern Tide Analysis and Prediction — Some Personal Memories

The science of tide analysis and prediction reached so high a level of achievement in the early years of this century that there was little change or improvement for about fifty years. However, as electronic computers became both available and more powerful, very significant changes were introduced into virtually all aspects of tide observation, analysis and prediction. By virtue of this author’s service for many years in the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, the Atlantic Meteorological and Oceanographic Laboratories and, more recently, at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, he has been a participant in many aspects of the changed procedures. His memories of how these changes came about are featured in this paper

The legal and ethical implications of electronic patient health records and e-health on Australian privacy and confidentiality law

This thesis addresses the legal and ethical issues posed by introduction of electronic patient health records. Against the background of an analysis of broader conceptual and theoretical understandings of development of electronic patient health records (EPR) and e-health regimes in Australia and comparable countries over the last few decades, the thesis critically examines the extent to which its implementation is consistent with established legal and ethical principles underpinning traditional health assumptions and practices. To this end the thesis explores the evolution and progress of modern health, technology, law and governance issues in e-health, identifying critical features of emerging EPR and e-health systems such as broad innovative industry technology involvement, and potentially problematic practices such as personal information ‘collection’, ‘sharing’ and ‘networking’ activities. The thesis contends that while adopting technology such as e-health comports with modern day progress, the transformational power of technology on society and individual lives has the potential to impose significant human costs for health consumers and everyday life. Through an analysis of the new electronic regime the thesis reveals how Australian Governments, healthcare providers, consumers and other stakeholders interpret and deal with advances in personal healthcare information changes in the new electronic system. The healthcare privacy model advanced in the thesis, in conjunction with an analysis grounded in theories of deliberative democracy, provides the foundation for the thesis argument that the legal, ethical and democratic challenges posed to privacy and participation interests by implementation of e-health policies can best be alleviated in Australia through further structural reforms beyond those recently proposed by a federal review. The thesis contends that an independent ‘Council’, with broad powers to consult and engage the public is an important part of the solution to the political and economic problems identified by the thesis analysis showing that individual privacy protection in healthcare is threatened and that earlier privacy protection mechanisms may prove inadequate in the emerging global information era

A harmonic method for predicting shallow-water tides

The development of an objective technique for identifying significant hidden frequencies in the spectrum makes it possible to accurately predict shallow-water tides by harmonic methods. For Anchorage, Alaska, the 114 constituents used include frequencies in every species (cycles per day) from 0 to 12. The larger set of constituents improved the predictions in times of high and low waters, range of tide, and shape of curve. The stationary characteristics of some of the added constituents have been tested with three years of Philadelphia data

The optimum wiggliness of tidal admittances

Some numerical experiments with recent offshore tide measurements have examined various parameters involved in tidal prediction by the response method: the number of prediction weights, their lead (and lag) times, and the treatment of radiational tides. The optimum number of weights depends directly on the length of record and inversely on noise level in a tidal band; more weights degrade the prediction and generate an artificial wiggliness in the admittance