Disclaimer and comments policy Welcome to my blog. I hope you’ll find my opinions interesting even if you don’t agree with them. Disclaimer Please don’t take my opinions about privacy law as legal advice and act on them because I don’t have a law qualification and, be warned, an Appeal Panel said “ALZ’s alternative construction…
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Reasoning rejected I don’t know what it’s like to be a member of the New South Wales Civil and Administrative Tribunal or whether a member can be truly independent or whether their decisions are required to be consistent rather than correct but I do know that they should not, directly or otherwise, “adopt the reasoning”[1]…
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Powers preserved A conclusion jumped to by the New South Wales Administrative Decisions Tribunal and adopted by the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal is applied in privacy cases to dismiss applications that the Legislature, it appears, intended the Tribunal to decide. The conclusion – that an internal review application is a precondition to the Tribunal’s…
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AQG v Secretary, Department of Customer Service Where a misconceived mania for form prevailed over substance Background Revenue NSW, which is part of the Department of Customer Service (Department)[1] issued AQG with a penalty notice on the basis of information about AQG that AQG said was false and misleading.[2] PPIP Act review applications Internal AQG…
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Administrative functions This blog post concerns the meaning of the words ‘administrative functions’ in s 27 of the Privacy and Personal Information Protection Act 1998 (NSW) (PPIP Act) which says: (1) Despite any other provision of this Act, the … the NSW Police Force … are not required to comply with the information protection principles.…
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Propositions and principles In lieu of construing the ‘Limits on disclosure’ information protection principle (IPP) of the Privacy and Personal Information Protection Act 1998 (PPIP Act) and the ‘Limits on disclosure’ Health Privacy Principle (HPP) of the Health Records and Information Privacy Act 2002 (NSW) (HRIP Act) the New South Wales Civil and Administrative Tribunal applies propositions…
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Sophistry Individuals should be able to have wrong information held by the New South Wales Police Force (Police) on the Computerised Operational Policing System database (COPS database) amended but they can’t, not because the Police are unable to amend wrong personal information, they are, but because the Police plain don’t want to. Individuals have tried…
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DQU v University of New England Where s 10(b) of the PPIP Act should have been an issue but wasn’t. Background The University of New England (University) had a dual purpose for collecting information about DQU (who wanted to come to Australia with his wife and son to study at university[1]) and his brother DQV…
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BWY v Secretary, Department of Education [2020] NSWCATAD 208 Where breaches of three Acts and a person’s rights were neither acknowledged nor dealt with. Background BWY worked for the Department of Education (Department) for a long time. She and her colleagues didn’t agree about everything all of the time, but who does? She was made…
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Rights and wrongs Two wrongs EFR, a child, went to the shops with some other young people and took items valued at $8.20 without paying for them. She was issued with a caution by an officer of the New South Wales Police Force (the Police) under the Young Offenders Act 1997 (NSW).[1] The Police phoned…
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Privacy rights and law enforcement functions (Amended on 19 July 2020. See post script.) Mr Cavallaro, a former member of the New South Wales Police Force (the Police), sent an open letter to his former colleagues who were serving police officers. The open letter came to the attention of an inspector and a detective inspector…
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Power, jurisdiction, duty When questions of law arose in a privacy proceeding in the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal (Tribunal), where I was the applicant, I asked the Tribunal to, under s 54(1) of the Civil and Administrative Tribunal Act 2013 (NSW) (CAT Act), refer the questions of law to the Supreme Court for the…
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Inconsistency Section 25, PPIP Act Section 25 of the Privacy and Personal Information Protection Act 1998 (NSW) (PPIP Act) says: “A public sector agency is not required to comply with section 9, 10, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18 or 19 if the agency is lawfully authorised or required not to comply with the principle concerned, or…
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Principle of illegality The New South Wales Civil and Administrative Tribunal (Tribunal) has case law that needs wiping out because it stands in the way of persons (whose privacy was interfered with by public agencies in NSW) having their matters decided according to law. The Tribunal’s case law from the Appeal Panel’s decision in PN…
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2020’s vision I hope 2020 brings a way of wiping out the two decades of case law ‘principles’, ‘rules’ and ‘misconstructions’ that the New South Wales Civil and Administrative Tribunal (Tribunal) applies in privacy matters because if it does persons whose privacy was interfered with by a NSW public agency stand a chance of having…
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Damages as compensation According to s 55(2)(a) of the Privacy and Personal Information Protection Act 1998 (NSW) (PPIP Act) the New South Wales Civil and Administrative Tribunal (Tribunal) has the jurisdiction to, “On reviewing the conduct of the public sector agency concerned”, make an order “requiring the public sector agency to pay to the applicant…
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Discretion The NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal dismissed a proceeding (a privacy matter) commenced by DQW, a client of the Department of Family and Community Services (now the Department of Communities and Justice), after it found that DQW had filed her review application before a pre-condition that gave the Tribunal jurisdiction existed.[1] (The Tribunal’s finding…
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