392 THE FEDERATIONS AND THE UNION [PART 1v
be employed on such occasions without direct statutory
authority. The Government, however, maintained that
there would be no invasion of Parliamentary privilege ; they
merely afforded a really effective means of testing the
accusations made in Parliament by the Opposition; and
they persisted in the course proposed, with the result that
the commissioners rebutted the charges, but the Opposition
refrained from pressing them by giving evidence.!
It may be added that the power to legislate as to the
judicial power of the Commonwealth does not enable the
Parliament to confer rights on the High Court which are
not valid exercises of purely judicial functions. Thus the
proposal to convert the High Court into a Criminal Court of
Appeal, with all the powers exercised by the English Criminal
Appeal Court, although ably defended in the Senate by its
promoter, the late Senator Neild, never got beyond that
House, in view of the grave constitutional questions its
enactment would have raised 2
§ 7. FINANCE AND TRADE
The revenues of the Commonwealth are constituted into
a consolidated fund charged with the expenses of collection
and then with the Commonwealth expenditure. No appro-
priation can be drawn from the Treasury except under a law,
but the Governor-General in Council was authorized to draw
from it until a month after the first meeting of Parliament
moneys to defray the cost of administration and the expenses
of an election. Provision was also made for the transfer of
officers to the Commonwealth with the transferred depart-
ment, and for the payment to them on retirement of pensions
if the service had been in the state to the end, but requiring
the state to pay a proportion of the salaries awarded. State
officers not retained in the service were to receive the same
pension as if they had been retired on abolition of office, the
payment to be defrayed by the state. Any officer transferred
from a state service to a Commonwealth service should receive
+ Parliamentary Debates, 1910-1, pp. 1502-51.
Cf. Turner, Australian Commonwealth, p. 240.
