Oscar I Roos and Yee-Fui Ng, 'Act of Grace Payments and the Constitution' (2024) 46(1) Sydney Law Review 55-86

This article focuses on a hitherto underexplored but increasingly important areaof public expenditure: act of grace payments. Act of grace payments arevoluntary, highly discretionary gifts of money made by the executive in theabsence of any legal duty to do so. The expenditure on such payments in Australiahas been significant, and a lack of transparency creates serious risks to integrity.Further, the cases of Pape v Federal Commissioner of Taxation, Williams vCommonwealth and Williams v Commonwealth [No 2] have transformed theconstitutional framework for public expenditure. Accordingly, this articleconducts a fine-grained analysis of the constitutional legality of act of gracepayments at the Commonwealth, state and territory levels. The authors argue thatthere are significant constitutional issues with act of grace payments at theCommonwealth level, and that many state-based act of grace payments are likelyto be illegal. To address these issues, and to reduce the risk that payments will bemade illegally, the authors recommend several legislative and soft law changes.