868 THE FEDERATIONS AND THE UNION [PART 1V 
by all the four justices by whom the case was heard. The 
point for the Employés’ Federation was put in two ways. 
In the first place, it was argued that a prohibition was 
within the language of s. 31 of the Act of 1904, which enacted 
that ‘no award of the Court shall be challenged, appealed 
against, reviewed, quashed or called in question in any other 
Court on any account whatsoever’. Or as it was also put 
under the Constitution, s. 73, an appeal lay to the High 
Court from every Federal Court unless otherwise enacted 
by Parliament, and as an appeal had been denied by s. 31, 
the jurisdiction of the Court was thus denied on any question 
which could be raised by appeal. To this argument Grif- 
fith C.J. pointed out as a complete answer that in the first 
place in Clancy’s case? the Court had decided on identical 
words in the New South Wales Industrial Arbitration Act, 
1901, that the enactment did not apply to cases in which 
an inferior Court had exceeded its jurisdiction, and in the 
second place, even if no appeal lay to the prohibiting Court 
it did not follow that enforcement of the judgement might 
not be prohibited by a Court having jurisdiction to make 
an order, and in the great majority of cases of prohibition 
the prohibiting Court was not a Court of Appeal from the 
Court prohibited. 
The other ground of objection was that the Court had no 
original jurisdiction to grant prohibition to an inferior Federal 
Court. To this the answer was—according to the Chief 
Justice—that s. 75 (v) conferred original jurisdiction upon 
the High Court in all matters in which a writ of mandamus 
or prohibition or injunction was sought against an officer 
of the Commonwealth. Prohibition did not lie except to 
persons exercising judicial or quasi-judicial functions, and it 
could not be denied that the judge of the Arbitration Court 
was an officer of the Commonwealth or that his functions 
were judicial. Even if the words of s. 75 were ambiguous, 
the necessity of such controlling power was so apparent that 
the ambiguity should be resolved in favour of the power. 
But in any case the Court clearly had jurisdiction under 
“11 C. Le R. 1, at pp. 20 seq. *1C L. BR. 151.