30.
power to the Comptroller-General of Customs to require persons believed to be capable of giving information in relation to an alleged offence against Pt II of the Australian Industries Preservation Act to answer questions and produce documents in relation to the alleged offence.
71 All members of the Court agreed that s 15B was valid. Four Justices (Griffith CJ, Barton, O'Connor and Higgins JJ) held ss 5 and 8 to be invalid; Isaacs J disagreed. The five members of the Court gave separate reasons for judgment. The headnote writer for the Commonwealth Law Reports rightly records[1] that four separate views of s 51(xx) are to be identified in the reasons.
72 All members of the Court concluded that s 51(xx) does not give power to the Parliament to make a law providing for the creation of trading or financial corporations[2]. This was an important first step in the reasons of all members of the Court and its taking was prompted by the way in which argument had been presented. As O'Connor J noted[3], counsel for the respondent, supporting the validity of the impugned provisions, had initially submitted[4] that s 51(xx) gave the Parliament "authority to create corporations and to make laws with respect to everything which has relation to the powers and scope of corporations". The real question, so the argument proceeded[5], was whether the impugned provisions "are in fact legislation dealing with corporations or legislation dealing with some other subject and applying it to corporations". Section 51(xx) was said to extend "to regulating the internal management and restraining the external affairs of corporations [and] to enabling Parliament to forbid corporations doing certain things"[6].
73 The respondent in Huddart Parker also advanced an alternative, less expansive, contention, that assumed that the power of creating all of the kinds of
