Chapter III and legislative competence to stipulate that a material legal error is non-jurisdictional

Abstract

It has been widely assumed that Australian Parliaments enjoy plenary power to provide that legal errors are non-jurisdictional. The recently articulated materiality threshold for jurisdictional error raises an intriguing possibility: Might the Court now recognise a general rule that material legal errors are jurisdictional? This article argues that the Constitution supports this step for executive powers, and State judicial powers outside Supreme Courts. There is a discernible scheme within Ch III of the Constitution to ensure legal accountability for governmental powers over legal status; and it is incongruous with the scheme that non-jurisdictional error should operate to deny accountability for material legal error, as it does if applied to such errors in executive powers and State judicial powers outside Supreme Courts. Thus, the integrity of the Ch III accountability scheme requires a general rule that material legal errors in these two categories of powers are jurisdictional errors.