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Commonwealth act
This Act has been repealed and is no longer in force. It is retained for historical reference.
This Act is Australia's legal "bridge" from wartime back to peacetime. When World War II ended, the Commonwealth had been running the country under sweeping emergency powers granted by the National Security Act 1939 — a wartime law that allowed the government to make regulations (rules with the force of law) controlling almost every aspect of Australian life: food, shipping, employment, capital investment, property, rationing, and more. When the war ended and the National Security Act expired, the government couldn't just switch everything off overnight — contracts existed, pensions were being paid, people were employed under wartime rules, and court cases were ongoing. This Act manages that wind-down in an orderly way.
Broadly, anyone whose rights, obligations, or arrangements existed under wartime regulations, including:
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Direct links to the current provisions in Defence (Transitional Provisions) Act 1946.
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View on official registerSourced from the Federal Register of Legislation (legislation.gov.au), CC BY 4.0.
The Act has four main jobs:
Keeps certain wartime regulations alive temporarily. A long list of National Security regulations (set out in the First Schedule) were kept in force — with some modifications to strip out war-specific language — until the end of 1952 at the latest ("the prescribed time"). This gave industries, workers, and businesses time to transition to normal peacetime laws.
Preserves existing rights and instruments. Any licence, permit, certificate, contract, court order, or industrial award that existed under the old wartime rules is treated as still valid — just as if it had been made under the new transitional regulations. If a government body that held a contract or owned property no longer existed, the Commonwealth itself stepped in as the substitute party.
Protects war compensation payments. Even though the war compensation regulations technically expired at the end of 1946, any pension already being paid kept flowing. People who had earned the right to claim a pension but hadn't yet done so were given three months to lodge their claim. Claims already lodged but not decided were still processed.
Amends a handful of other Acts to update their citations and make minor consequential changes needed for the transition (e.g. the Crimes Act, the Black Marketing Act, the Post and Telegraph Act).
This Act is a classic example of post-emergency "sunset" legislation — law designed not to create new permanent powers, but to ensure a smooth, fair, and legally certain unwinding of extraordinary wartime controls. Without it, thousands of contracts, pensions, licences, and employment arrangements could have been left in legal limbo the moment the National Security Act expired.