'Castles and Casualties: Recent Case Law About Procedure, Trespass and the Private Sphere' by Bruce Baer Arnold in (2019)
Privacy Law Bulletin comments
How does privacy – the protection of the private sphere from inappropriate interference – play out in Australian law? Given media coverage over the past decade members of the public and other non-specialists are likely to understand privacy as a matter of sensitive personal data, addressed through information privacy statutes such as the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth), the Census and Statistics Act 1905 (Cth) and the Health Records (Privacy and Access) Act 1997 (ACT). In contrast practitioners recognise that privacy encompasses physical and spatial integrity, for example protection from arbitrary and disproportionate searches of an individual’s dwelling place or person. They also recognise that procedure is important, with non-compliance by officials or other entities potentially invalidating searches and resulting in damages awards.
Two recent judgments in the Northern Territory and New South Wales – O’Neill and Attalla – illustrate the salience of historic law regarding the protection of the private sphere and the scope for courts to restrict official action that is disproportionate. They also highlight concerns about misreading by law enforcement personnel of formal procedures regarding searches. This article considers those judgments.
The article considers
O’Neill v Roy [2019] NTSC 23 and
Attalla v State of NSW [2018] NSWDC 190 among other judgments.
