Six obligations of public bodies

... for effective provision of public legal information:

(including additional information best provided at source)

- all Australian Parliamentary Counsel provide consolidated legislation

- Australian Courts and Tribunals always provide written decisions

- Australian Courts now provide a court-designated citation

- many Courts now provide paragraph numbering for pinpoint citations

- most Courts now email decisions direct to AustLII, sometimes within hours

- most Courts are standardising decision production using templates

- some legislation is downloaded overnight by our web spider

- all Australian OPCs provide consolidated legislation to AustLII for free

- all Australian Courts provide their judgments to AustLII for free

- some still charge legal publishers more than cost-recovery

- 'user pays' does not support access to justice or the rule of law

- no Courts or OPCs charge AustLII licence fees, provided access is free

- some Courts and OPCs charge licence fees to commercial publishers

- competition in the provision of legal information should be encouraged

- 'backsets' are necessary to protect late entrants and the public interest

- Australia lost 10 years of public legal information by ignoring this

- whether the public authority maintains its own web site is not the key issue