85.
necessary protection? I am afraid that I still cannot understand why this cannot be done."
221 Although the recommendations of the Senate Standing Committee were not initially adopted in the 1981 draft of the Archives Bill, which retained the exclusion of the Governor-General's records, they were adopted when the Archives Bill was reintroduced in 1983. The 1983 version of the Archives Bill removed the exclusion of the Governor-General's records and inserted the "official establishment of the Governor-General" into the definition of "Commonwealth institution". In the Second Reading Speech the Minister for Home Affairs and Environment said that "[t]he provisions of the legislation will apply to the records of the official establishment of the Governor-General, but not to his private or personal records"[1].
222 In this context, the expression therefore connotes the institutional apparatus that supports and assists the official acts of the Governor-General, equivalent to the institutional apparatus of a Department that supports and assists a Minister[2]. As the appellant pointed out in oral submissions, the only other similar statutory phrase is a reference to the "Governor-General's Establishment"[3] in legislation which appropriated £10,000 from the Consolidated Revenue Fund to defray the expenses of "the Governor-General's establishment in connexion with the visit to Australia of Their Royal Highnesses the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and York".
The holding of property by the Commonwealth or Commonwealth institutions
223 Although the focus of the Archives Act is upon Commonwealth institutions of government in accordance with the conceptions of ordinary life, on several occasions the Archives Act uses the comprehensive expression "the property of the Commonwealth or of a Commonwealth institution". One example is s 62(2), which is concerned with the transfer of samples of objects from Commonwealth institutions, where those samples being transferred from the Commonwealth institution are the property of the Commonwealth or of a Commonwealth institution. Another, and the matter of present significance, is the definition in s 3(1) of "Commonwealth record" as including property of the Commonwealth or of a Commonwealth institution.
