Abstract:
The Acts Interpretation Act 1924, as its title indicates, is a statute designed to facilitate the construction and application of statutes; and this purpose it purports to effect by the prescription of certain rules to be applied in the consideration of the terms of a statutory provision. These rules are in some cases but the repetition of principles already developed by the Courts for themselves; in other cases they break new ground and enunciate principles which had never been adumbrated in the Courts.
One of the rules which that Act provides in subsection (k) of section 5 relates to the construction of statutes which purport to affect the rights of the Crown; that provision is in these terms:-
