If there’s one thing that warms the otherwise icy hearts of common lawyers, it’s a story of lesser breeds, without the law, guaranteed to induce the smuggest self-satisfaction and certainty as to the superiority of our law and social norms.

So it was with Matt Bevan presenting a recent piece in “If You’re Listening?” on ABC TV.  He gave us Ivanka Trump and husband Jared Kushner arriving off the Albanian coast in a private yacht larger than a Manly ferry (actually, much larger) and “discovering” Sazan Island. 

They swam ashore and fell in love (with the island).  So much natural beauty.  A transnational flyway for migratory birds.  A world-class wetland of lagoons left untouched by the military occupation of the island during the previous iron-fisted communist regime.

What do billionaires do when they fall in love?  They buy the object of their passion. Keep up, Scotty Fitzgerald fingered the quirky quality over a century ago: “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.”

The great unwashed still go about their amatory business in an ancient spirit of immanence (even though that’s not how they’d put it).  But the mega-rich immediately make the object of adoration part of a transactional gambit.  It might have something to do with how they become billionaires. 

But this is not about selfishness: the deathless duo bought the island for US$1.4 billion from Artur Shehu (a Miami-based businessman wanted in Albania for allegedly laundering drug money) with the complicity of a very willing Albanian government – expressly for the purpose of building a resort so other very rich people could come and enjoy the delights of Sazan Island. 

There was a web of environmental protection regulation relating to the island, but in the interests of commerce, that was quickly set aside.

Those who seek a resort approachable only by private super yacht aren’t that obsessed with migratory birds, the fate of wetland amphibians, or laws that get in the way.  But it turned out that a lot of ordinary Albanians were. 

For background, I draw on recent electronic surveys and Dua Lipa, the Anglo-Albanian crooner and Grammy award winner. With large-scale street protests taking place (the Flamingo Revolution, celebrating the lead bird in the international migration caper), anger was being expressed at the destruction of what had been a nature reserve, even if Albania post-communism hadn’t yet developed a system of national parks. 

The big question was whether it had a system for regulating environmental protection at all.

In less than two years since the purchase (and how did the fragrant Artur Shehu come to own a former military base) with deforestation and barbed wire fences to limit access to the area, the damage was already irreversible for the delicate ecosystem: the destruction of the millennial dunes of Zvërnec; the interruption of the water exchange of the Narta Lagoon; and the fragmentation of the migratory corridor, the Adriatic Flyway.

With public pressure mounting, on 1st June 2026, the Albanian Special Prosecution Office Against Corruption and Organized Crime opened an investigation into the alterations to the island’s protected status and land ownership. The investigation aimed to shed light on the controversial legislative amendments adopted in 2024 that changed the status of protected areas, allowing real estate development, and on the funds and methods of land acquisition that took place without regular tenders.

Goodness me, you’d think this was going on in NSW. On cue, the Albanian government claimed that the land concerned was privately owned and acquired in a transparent manner.

But that was Albania, not say Western Australia, where it was only public resistance and determination in the Supreme Court that stopped the Burke, then Dowding governments from flogging off Hepburn Heights, a Crown Reserve and much-loved woodland in Perth’s northern suburbs, to developer mates: Re Smith; ex parte Rundle (1991) 5 WAR 295.

There you are: our grand tradition of separation of powers and independent courts ensures propriety, even from the likes of a Burke government. 

The riposte to that self-congratulatory sentiment is illustrated by the South Australian Rann government’s cutting out the middleman: when litigation is looking inconvenient, just pass an Act terminating the cause of action. 

The particular cause celebre was sometime Premier Donny Dunstan’s last partner, Stephen Cheng, turning up with an application for a partner’s pension under amendments made to the Parliamentary Superannuation (Scheme for New Members) Amendment Act 1995 (SA) in 2003.  Parliament had added in de facto partners to the spouses with entitlements on the death of the honourable member.  Given that de facto partners might now legally be gay, the prospect arose of a same-sex partner of a former member of the South Australian parliament, deceased at the time of the 2003 amendments, claiming superannuation.

Dunstan had died in 1999, and following the 2003 amendments that allowed for de facto partners, Cheng applied for a superannuation payout and was rebuffed. He filed proceedings in the Supreme Court: Cheng v State of South Australia (Supreme Court No 694 of 2005).

The then Labor government was having none of it. A further amendment was immediately passed: the Parliamentary Superannuation (Scheme for New Members) Amendment Act 1995 (SA), Sch 1, which prescribed (with retrospective effect) that the entitlements to superannuation only arose in respect of a member of parliament who died on or after 3 July 2003.

The SA Parliament merely crushed one man’s claim in court. 

Western Australia, confronted with litigation that would end up in the High Court as Yougarla v WA (2001) 207 CLR 344, amended its Interpretation Act to include s.76A which purported to apply the Australia Acts 1986 (WA, UK and Commonwealth) retrospectively in respect of any prior constitutional legislation. 

This considerably constrained the claim by Blackfellas for the one percent of public revenue that they claimed was owed under the State’s 1890 Constitution.  A lone voice, that of Alannah MacTiernan in the WA Parliament, expressed concern that the 1994 Interpretation Act amendment would retroactively validate the purported old repeals of the provisions promising the one percent – those legally questionable repeals being the subject of the litigation. (See WA Parliamentary Debates (Hansard), Legislative Council, 5 April 1994, debate on Interpretation Act Amendment Bill, at 11260 – 11265). 

The amendment passed in any event.

Lesser breeds without the law are marked by the malleability of their law to executive manipulation, usually to satisfy mates, exactly the complaint of the Albanian groundlings (and Dua Lipa) in the destruction of Sazan Island. 

Setting aside the simplistic WA Inc attitude that led to Rundle’s case, Australian jurisdictions cover their manipulation of the law in the more sophisticated cloak of parliamentary sovereignty.

Destroy litigation that’s on foot, the trick employed by the Bannon Labor government in SA in 1990 in facts that prefigured Ivanka, Jared and Sazan Island. The litigation involved special leave being sought after the Full Court decision in ACF v SA and Ophix Pty Ltd (1990) 53 SASR 349. 

Ophix was a $2 company (not quite up there with Ivanka and Jared) intent on developing Wilpena Pound with the complete pink hotel treatment, right down to an airfield capable of taking 747s. The greenies were getting under Bannon’s skin as they slowed the development that he favoured. 

The remedy was to flatten the litigation by Act of Parliament: the Wilpena Station Tourist Facility Act 1990.  Showing maximum contempt, the government threw $10,000 at the lawyers for ACF who had litigated from single judge, to Full Court and into the High. After all that, Ophix got cold feet and pulled out.

At least we don’t alter the law by press release (do we ?) as NZ PM Piggy Muldoon tried to do, only to be thwarted by Wild CJ in Fitzgerald v Muldoon [1976] 2 NZLR 615. 

The Bill of Rights 1689 still forbids the executive to alter statutes unilaterally. But in the AFR August 6, 2026, on page 4, I find an article on delay to changes in “the widow tax”. The by-blow from the May budget needs cleaning up but is delayed in drafting:

“In the interim, Treasury has advised the banks to extend credit to anyone needing to refinance an investment property inherited as a consequence of marriage breakdown, on the assumption that the widow tax would soon be abolished.”

The Executive is advising behaviour on a presumed future alteration of the law.

Albania is closer than you think.  The Rule of Law is as fragile as the nearest politician with a developer in tow.