ABSTRACT
In New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia, the criminal law is based on English common law as supplemented, extensively, by local and Imperial statutes. Those latter statutes may be very old inheritances. By contrast, Queensland and Western Australia are what might be termed Griffith Code jurisdictions, as their criminal law is codified, based on the code developed by Sir Samuel Griffith for Queensland at the turn of the twentieth century and supplemented extensively by local statutes. Tasmania, like New Zealand and Canada, combined local consolidations with Stephens draft English Code 187880 as the primary model for codification. The Commonwealth of Australia, that is to say, the federal Australian entity, the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) and the Northern Territory have adopted the Model Criminal Code. There has not been a great deal of judicial consideration of the Model Criminal Code.
