the submission of Advocate Wim Trengove (counsel for the appellants) that, as far as deference to the Legislature was concerned, there was no difference, in principle, between the court's rendering a statutory provision constitutional by removing the offending part by actual or notional severance, and the court's doing the same thing by reading words into a statutory provision. In both cases, the parliamentary enactment, as expressed in a statutory provision, was being altered by the order of the court—in the one case by excision and in the other by addition. "This chance difference," wrote Ackermann, "cannot by itself establish a difference in principle." The only relevant enquiry, he held, was what the consequences of such an order were, and whether they constituted an unconstitutional intrusion into the domain of the Legislature. Any other conclusion would lead to what he described as the absurdity that the granting of a remedy would depend on the fortuitous circumstance of the form in which the Legislature had chosen to enact the provision in question. A Legislature could, for example, extend certain benefits to life-partners generally and exclude same-sex life partners by way of express exception. In such case there would be no objection to declaring the exception invalid, where a Court was satisfied that such severance was, on application of whatever the appropriate test might be, constitutionally justified in relation to the Legislature. It would be absurd to deny the reading-in remedy, where it was equally constitutionally justified in relation to the Legislature, simply because of its form. There was, Ackermann found, "nothing in the Constitution to suggest that form must be placed above substance in a way that would result in so glaring an anomaly." He concluded, accordingly, that reading in, "depending on all the circumstances," was an appropriate form of relief under section 38 of the Constitution. He quoted with approval the Canadian case of Knodel v British Columbia (Medical Services Commission): "Whether a court 'reads in' or 'strikes out' words from a challenged law, the focus of the Court should be on the appropriate remedy in the circumstances and not on the label used to arrive at the result." The real question, according to Ackermann, was "whether, in the circumstances of the present matter, reading in would be just and equitable and an appropriate remedy." Retrospective effect In this case, the words "or partner, in a permanent same-sex life partnership," were