🚀 go-pugleaf

Greg Taylor wrote:

[in the 1997 article]
> "We were informed today that we were also expected to monitor
> our users' activities on the Net, including reading private E-Mail.
> Our response was that we thought such behaviour was in
> breach of the Telecommunications Act.  But apparently not.
> This new Act mandates behaviour that was previously a serious
> crime."

But if that's the case, the service provider could pretty easily get 
leave to appeal to the High Court (although it would be expensive and 
need the support of users and providers nationally hence) and have the 
legislation struck down as unconstitutional according to s.109 (which 
provides that a Federal law in an area in which it is competent to 
legislate (a list of about 36 of these provided in section 51) will 
prevail over a conflicting State law.  See for example West Australia v 
The Commonwealth (183 CLR 373), Commonwealth v Tasmania (The Tasmanian 
Dam Case) (1983), Mabo v Queensland (no.1) (1988) 166 CLR 186.  (these 
can be accessed off the AustLII database at 

http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/183clr373.html (quite good)
http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/166clr186.html (intelligible :-)

and you can search from the root directory for Tasmanian Dam, that was 
how I turned it up (although you're probably better just reading the 
excerpts quoted in the two above cases - the Tasmanian Dam case is 749k, 
the other two are about 200k each).  If you want readability (these are 
text format) e-mail me and I can attach Word documents of the same.

Regds, Andrew