Old principles never die, they just ...

J.S. Mill on Victorian Christianity (thanks to Alan Haworth Free Speech (Routledge 1998) at 2):

that it exemplified "a progressive tendency to forget all of the belief except the formularies, or to give it a dull and torpid assent, as if accepting it on trust dispensed with the necessity of realising it in consciousness, or testing it by personal experience".

So I think it is with the Australian test for patentability now. Despite the concern of the court in NRDC to avoid a precise formulation of what is patentable and what is not, the case has with time become authority only for the need to recite an (unsurprisingly strained, and on closer inspection, almost entirely meaningless) phrase which says that something will be patentable if it is "an artificially created state of affairs of value in the field of economic endeavour".