Good Faith Down Under

Does Australian contract law include an implied duty of good faith in performance?  The law seems to be in flux, and Tyrone M. Carlin of the Graduate School of Management at Macquarie University zeroes in on the cases, not the rhetoric, in Assertion Versus Evidence — Taking a Closer Look at Implied Good Faith Performance Obligations in Australia.  Here’s the abstract:

The question of the status of implied good faith performance obligations as an element of the Australian law of contract continues to lurk as a vital yet unresolved jurisprudential puzzle. Given the vital importance of contract as a foundation for commercial exchange and the potential for a good faith performance doctrine to materially impact the operation of contracts, this is an undesirable state of affairs. The evidence presented in this paper suggests that the approach taken to good faith performance has fragmented along jurisdictional lines. Further, far from representing a well developed and established doctrine, it has been the project of a very limited number of judges primarily drawn from just one state. These observations raise significant questions as to the legitimacy of the alleged doctrine.

[Frank Snyder]