Page 2017 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 3 June 2015
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That this Assembly:
(1) notes:
(a) that 15 June 2015 marks the 800th anniversary of the signing of the Magna Carta; and
(b) the historic and legal significance of the Magna Carta; and
(2) affirms the importance of the rule of law to the people of the Australian Capital Territory.
Mr Assistant Speaker, 15 June marks the 800th anniversary of the signing of the Magna Carta by King John at Runnymede near Windsor. I think it is important on such an important anniversary that we should pause for a while and contemplate, as I said in the motion, the historic and legal significance of the Magna Carta. Most importantly, we should contemplate the importance of such a document in the establishment of the rule of law in the legal systems that we have come to develop over those 800 years and the significance that has not only in the United Kingdom, not only in Australia, but also here in the Australian Capital Territory.
In a previous millennium, when I was an adviser to an attorney-general, I recall that in a statute law amendment bill we actually repealed the Magna Carta act in the ACT. I know that the attorney-general at the time was very concerned at the prospect that, although a symbolic thing, we might be throwing out a long history. But the ACT no longer has a Magna Carta act.
It is true that many of the provisions in the Magna Carta no longer hold a great deal of relevance—for example, the ways in which weirs were taxed in the United Kingdom or in England in 1215 were quite different from the taxation systems that we have today. But that does not diminish the importance of the Magna Carta and it is why we should spend some time in a legislature contemplating the importance of the Magna Carta.
A little bit of history, because this is a pretty nerdy subject and I am a history nerd: the Magna Carta was drafted by the Archbishop of Canterbury to make peace between King John, who, according to that seminal work 1066 and all that by Sellar and Yeatman, was not just a bad king; he was an awful king. The charter was to make peace between that king and a group of rebel barons.
It promised the protection of church rights, the protection for the barons from illegal imprisonment, access to swift justice and a limitation on feudal payments to the Crown to be implemented through a council of barons. That seems pretty unexceptional, but at the time it was a problem. There were unjust levies against landowners. If landowners did not pay, their lands were summarily consumed by the Crown.
As was the case in 1215, neither side stood by their commitments. The church did not take a very strong view on the issue as well, and Pope Innocent III annulled the original Magna Carta in 1216. This led to a series of civil wars. After John’s death, his
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