Welcome to lawlex.com.au, your entry point for Australian legislative and regulatory information and research.

The following SAI Global products are available on lawlex.com.au:

• Lawlex Premium
• LexConnect
• Regulatory Newsfeeds
• Corporate Law Bulletin
• SH&E Monitor

Lawlex Premium is a subscription product that provides you with a single point of entry for conducting Australian legislation research. It covers:

• current legislation across all Australian States and Territories
• historical versions of legislation
• amendment history
• commencement information
• progress of Bills
• Gazette notice references
• second reading speeches
• explanatory memoranda
• compatibility statements
• association of Regulations to governing Acts
• governing department details
• codes of practice referenced in legislation (if also a CodeConnect subscriber)
• links to Australian Standards referenced in legislation (if also a LexConnect subscriber)

With Lawlex Premium you can also create your own alert profile, to keep you up to date with changes to the law. This includes:

• the ability to set customised profiles refined by jurisdiction, legislation title, subject and industry
• notification by email within 24 hours of publicly announced changes to or introduction of new legislation
• plain English summaries of those changes written by legally trained editors
• links to source documents

LexConnect is a subscription product that allows you to see Australian Standards® that are referenced in Australian legislation. The LexConnect online service provides anywhere, anytime understanding of which Standards are referenced in which Australian commonwealth, state and territory legislation.

LexConnect:

• covers all Australian legislation in all jurisdictions, and all Australian Standards®
• identifies any legislation that references Standards
• identifies other Standards that are also referenced in that legislation
• provides links to the legislation and to the Standards for viewing
• allows you to search by Standard within legislation
• allows you to browse by Standard within legislation. This feature allows you to browse all legislation that references by Standard, and can be done by alphabetical listing, subject area and jurisdiction

The CodeConnect online service provides access to all codes of practice referenced in Australian legislation, as well as all Australian Standards referenced in those codes.

CodeConnect Benefits

CodeConnect assists you in meeting your compliance obligations by indicating:

• If a code of practice that interests you is mandated by, or referred to, in legislation
• Where in the legislation it is referenced
• What other codes of practice are referenced in the same legislation
• What Australian Standards are referenced in those codes
• Where in the code it is referenced

How CodeConnect Works

With this simple to use service you can:

• Search via a legislation title search for codes of practice in that legislation
• Search via a code of practice title to find codes of practice that are referenced in legislation
• Search via an Australian Standard name or designation to find if that Standard is referenced in a code of practice that is referenced in legislation
• All of the search results that return (regardless of search type) will display the legislation, any codes of practice referenced in that legislation, and any Standard referenced in that code
• Browse legislation that has codes of practice referenced in it
• Use the "saved searches" and "recent searches" functions for CodeConnect searches
• On the Core Document Home Page, view any code of practice that is referenced in that legislation, as well as any Standards referenced in these codes of practice
• Hyperlinks through to the relevant legislation, code of practice and Standard

Regulatory Newsfeeds are a subscription product delivering comprehensive updates on the latest news and upcoming dates impacting the Australian regulatory environment across numerous industries and sectors.

Delivered weekly via email, Newsfeeds are hand crafted by our legal editors and subject matter experts, using the most authoritative sources to deliver knowledge of:

• Upcoming changes to the regulatory landscape
• Legislation, draft regulations, standards, codes of practice, consultation papers, policies and guidelines
• Ministerial and departmental statements
• Regulator developments and activities
• Media coverage of relevant regulatory issues

Our Regulatory Newsfeed range includes the following titles:

Risk Areas

• Employment, Workplace and Industrial Relations
• Environment, Sustainability and Climate Change
• Governance Risk & Compliance
• Occupational Health & Safety
• Transportation

Industries

• Building and Construction
• Electricity
• Financial Services
• Gas
• Insurance
• Legal Practice Governance
• Litigation
• Minerals and Petroleum
• Property
• Superannuation
• Water

Corporate Law Bulletin

SAI Global publishes the Corporate Law Bulletin on behalf of Professor Ian Ramsay, Director of the Centre for Corporate Law and Securities Regulation at The University of Melbourne.

Delivered monthly by email, the Corporate Law Bulletin provides summaries of:

• significant corporate law and corporate governance developments in Australia and internationally
• new and amended legislation
• recent corporate law judgments
• government policy decisions
• ASIC and ASX developments
• Takeovers Panel decisions

The Safety, Health and Environment Monitor (SH&E Monitor) is a comprehensive regulatory updating service, delivering weekly customised alerts on the impact of safety, health and environment related regulatory change to over 145 business processes.

Based on your business process selections, we provide plain English guidance on how to apply the changes to your business, which addresses the gap between understanding change and applying those changes to day to day business activities.

The SH&E Monitor covers:

• all Australian and New Zealand jurisdictions
• new and amended legislation
• standards
• codes of practice
• guidance notes
• industry practice guidelines and safety alerts

All changes are sent to your email inbox once a week, keeping you up to date with the latest regulatory activities.

The customised alerts ensure you and those in other roles in your business only receive relevant guidance on the changes and how to apply them.

General Questions

If you have any questions about how to use lawlex.com.au please see Help. Alternatively, contact us by phone on 131 242 (within Australia) or send us an email at info.regulatory@saiglobal.com.

Product Support

If you have any questions about your subscription with SAI Global, please contact your organisation’s administrator or your SAI Global Representative.

Training

If you require training on lawlex.com.au, please contact us by phone on 131 242 (within Australia) or send us an email at mylawlextraining@saiglobal.com.

Legislation Hotline

If you need a quick answer to a legislation query (e.g. a commencement date, the stage of consideration of a Bill or an assent), please contact the Legislation Hotline on 1300 738 372 (within Australia) or email us at legislationhotline@saiglobal.com.

Every legislation title available on lawlex.com.au has a Core Document Homepage.

The Core Document Homepage provides a variety of information about legislation to help you understand its development, including direct links to the latest online version. All information in the left hand column (not under Premium Research, LexConnect or CodeConnect), is freely available to all lawlex.com.au users.

1. View Legislation - takes the user to the legislation itself at its primary source, ie., the relevant Government body
2. Source - indicates the source of the legislation and links you to the latest online version
3. Document Status - whether the legislation is currently in operation or has been repealed (and date of currency, if applicable)
4. Related Links - direct links to further information about the legislation, including Hansard second reading speeches, explanatory memoranda, supplementary memoranda, and historical versions. The historical versions link is particularly useful as you can view the legislation at a particular point in time
5. Document Type - whether the legislation is principal, amending or other
6. Index Categories - lists the categories under which the legislation has been indexed. This is useful when browsing legislation or when setting up an Alert Profile (subscribers only)

Information in Lawlex Premium Research, LexConnect, and CodeConnect, is only available to Lawlex Premium subscribers.

If you or your organisation do not have a Lawlex Premium subscription and you would like to learn more about Premium Research, CodeConnect and LexConnect features, please contact us by phone on 131 242 (within Australia) or send us an email at info.regulatory@saiglobal.com.

Use the Quick Search box to quickly search across all legislation on lawlex.com.au.

The quick search box is located on the Lawlex Premium home page in the Search Legislation panel. Enter your keyword(s) and select a jurisdiction from the drop down menu.

The Quick Search function is also available at the top right hand corner of all other pages on the website.

Advanced Search, which can be found in the Search Legislation panel on the Lawlex home page, allows for a more guided search with various search criteria and filter options.

Advanced Search - searching for legislation

1. Keywords, excluding year and number - free text field; can use select search operators, including Boolean operators
2. Search In - Title (this is the default search type); Full Text (click on this to change from Title. This search looks for words within legislation documents)
3. Jurisdictions - select any combination of these, including all. All jurisdictions are ticked and selected by default. Clicking on a badge will change the badge colour from white to blue and a cross will appear against criteria that will be excluded from the search.
4. Document Type - search across principal and amending Acts and Regulations, Bills, Other Instruments, or any combination of these. All document types are ticked and selected by default. Clicking on a badge will change the badge colour from white to blue and a cross will appear against criteria that will be excluded from the search.
5. Year Range - you can enter a year or a range of years
6. Number - legislation document number
7. Remove Repealed/Failed Legislation - narrow your search to exclude this legislation
8. Show Additional Options - provides more filter options



9. Subject Categories - search across one or more of the 29 Lawlex Subject Index categories
10. Return/Sort By - allows for you to confirm how you want your search results to return

Note: Jurisdictions and Document Types are mandatory fields.

Note: Searches will automatically include repealed or failed legislation.

Note that if a piece of legislation has been renamed, you can also search for its former name in Title search. For example, a title search for "workplace relations" will return the Fair Work (Registered Organisations) Act 2009 1988 (Cth), which was formerly known as the Workplace Relations Act 1996 (Cth).

The Subject Category filter is not applicable when searching Bills. For example, when searching Principal Acts and Bills in the Banking and Finance category, the results will return Principal Acts assigned to the Banking and Finance category and Bills across all 29 subject categories.

When searching Bills, only current Bills will be returned in the results. You can find other Bills using Bill Tracking instead.

Using Search Operators

Search operators are commands used to combine keywords to broaden or narrow a search.

Legislation Search supports the use of the following search operators:

Select the Use search operators checkbox to apply these search operators to full text searches. This option only displays when Full-Text Search is selected. Please note that full text search results are not ranked by relevance when using these operators. When this option is left unchecked the search will treat these operators as regular keywords.

Please also note that the exact phrase operator is a standard feature when full text searching, and will be applied regardless of whether the Use search operators checkbox is selected.

Search Help

Actual Words Used

The Lawlex search engine retrieves the actual words that you enter into the Keywords field, rather than searching by subject.

Basic Keywords

When searching on Legislation Search, the default operator is and. This means that you do not need to add the word and when you are searching more than one word. If you enter words separated by spaces, the search will find documents that contain all of the words.

Boolean Operators

Boolean operators are specific words used to combine keywords to improve the chances of finding relevant information.

The words are:

• And - the search will return all documents that contain both the first term and the second term
• Or - the search will return all documents that contain either the first term or the second term or both
• Not - the search will find documents that contain the first term, but do not contain the second term

To include and, or, or not in your search, make them part of a phrase.

Case Sensitivity

Legislation searches are not case sensitive. All letters, regardless of how you enter them, are understood as lower case.

For example, searches for "Criminal Law", "criminal law", and "Criminal law" all return the same results.

Combining Search Operators

You can use as many search operators as required to narrow your search.

For example, "maritime safety" and (safety or "occupational health") not work will find documents that contain the phrase maritime safety and either the word safety or the phrase occupational health as long as they do not contain the word work.

Parentheses (brackets)

Parentheses or brackets group words into larger units, resulting in more specific searches. For example:

(health or safety) and work finds documents with either both health and work, or both safety and work.

health or (safety and work) finds documents with either just health, or both safety and work.

Phrases

If you enter words within quotation marks, the search will find the words exactly as they have been entered.

For example, "workplace health and safety" will find documents with the exact phrase workplace health and safety.

Stemming and Wildcard Searches

Stemming or wildcard searches are not supported. For example, searching for "crim" or "crim*" will not yield "crime" or "criminal". If in doubt try both forms, for example, "crime" and "criminal".

If your search finds any legislation, you will see their titles listed by document type as the default.

There is a Sort menu located just above the search results that will allow you to sort the results alphabetically by title, by document type, by jurisdiction and by year. All of these options can be selected in ascending or descending order.

The filter menu, located next to the sort menu, will allow you to further refine your initial, returned search results if you wish to narrow your search further. You can also select the edit search button to edit the search parameters and conduct the search again.

Next to each legislation title is an indication as to the type of document that it is (for example, AA refers to Amending Act; PR refers to Principal Regulation etc.). You can hover your mouse over these symbols to see the full text of the document type. To the far right of the legislation there will be an indication as to whether the legislation has been repealed. If there is no status on the far right, then the legislation is current.

To view a legislation document, click on its title to go to the Core Document Homepage.

A maximum number of 500 results will be displayed, but it is 100 that return by default. You can change the maximum number that returns by clicking on "show additional options" when entering your initial search parameters, and changing the number in the Return drop-down list. If your search exceeds this number, we recommend you refine your search query.

Full Text Search Results - Deep Linking

Please note that full text search results are based on content that is not hosted by lawlex.com.au. We therefore cannot provide deep links to full text search results.

Each legislation title is given a statistical relevance ranking to help you decide the usefulness of documents that have been retrieved. We recommend that you use the find or search feature within the documents to locate the specific terms you are interested in.

Search results are returned alphabetically, but can be sorted by relevance through the Sort filter. The Relevance option is only available on full text searching.

You can modify your search results by selecting the Filter menu located just above your search results. The Filter menu will show you the search parameters that you entered that can be further modified to narrow your search results. If you need to add more parameters to your search results, you will need to select the Edit Search button.

You can also start over again by clicking New Search.

Search results can be emailed, printed or downloaded using Microsoft Word and Adobe PDF. This can be done via the Share drop-down menu on the Search Legislation results page.

You can print or download the following Premium Research features:

• History of Amendments
• Amendments since last Consolidation
• Commencement Tables
• Commencement information (via the Core Document Homepage)
• Gazette Notice References
• Referenced Codes of Practice

You can also print a Core Document Homepage.

The My Searches feature is only available to Lawlex Premium subscribers and LexConnect subscribers. For more information, click on each product name.

You can Browse Legislation via the Search Legislation panel.

Browse Legislation is available to Guest users and Subscribers.

Browse Legislation allows you to browse lists of principal legislation alphabetically or via the Lawlex Subject Index, and then view the documents you want.

All principal legislation is categorised under the Lawlex Subject Index, including Acts, Bills, Regulations, Plans and By-laws. The subject index includes 29 categories with subcategories relevant to those 29 principal categories. For example, the "Torts" subcategory under the "Legal System" subject category contains the Defamation Acts and Civil Liability Acts of various jurisdictions.

To browse legislation, select one or more jurisdictions, and then select either the Alphabetical Index or a Subject Index from the Category drop down menu. Once you have selected a category you can select a subject from the Subject/Initial drop down menu, then select the Browse button to bring up the list of relevant legislation.

Legislation titles in the Alphabetical Index are arranged by name, and then by jurisdiction (if you have selected multiple jurisdictions).

Legislation titles in the Subject Index are arranged by subject, and then by name and jurisdiction (if you have selected multiple jurisdictions).

Selecting the legislation will take you to the Core Document Home Page for that legislation.

Note that you cannot browse amending legislation. You can find amending legislation using Search Legislation instead.

From the Lawlex Premium home page, click Bill Search.

Use Quick Search to find Bills for a given year, and in any number of jurisdictions.

All jurisdictions are ticked and selected by default. Clicking on a badge will change the badge colour from white to blue and a cross will appear against criteria that will be excluded from the search.

Once you have selected your jurisdiction(s) and a year, click Search.

Advanced Search allows for a more guided search with various search criteria and filter options. From the Lawlex Premium home page, click Bill Search.

Various criteria can be entered into Advanced Search.

1. Keywords - free text field, excluding the year.
2. Jurisdictions - select any combination of these, including all. All jurisdictions are ticked and selected by default. Clicking on a badge will change the badge colour from white to blue and a cross will appear against criteria that will be excluded from the search.
3. Date Range - enter a date range using the pop up calendar. The date is taken from the First Reading stage by default.
4. Stage - related to the date range field, select the stage at which you would like the date range to be taken from, i.e. Passed Second Reading, Third Reading, etc. The default stage is First Reading.
5. Bill Status - select the bill status relevant to your search. Note: searches performed on ‘current’ status, will not include Bills that have a status of ‘awaiting assent’.
6. Bill Type - select Principal or Amending, or both.
7. Return - confirm the number of search results to display.

Search results are listed in alphabetical order, and provide you with information about a Bill's progress through Parliament, from introduction to assent.

You can easily see the Bill’s status to the right of the Bill title, showing whether it is Current, Awaiting Assent, Assented, or Failed. For failed Bills, the status may display as Lapsed, Negatived, Withdrawn, etc.

Click on a Bill title to expand the view and see more details. It includes the stages and dates of progression, and notes on whether a Bill has been amended during its passage through a House.

The Bill's status is also included, showing whether the Bill is current, awaiting assent, or has failed. Click View Bill to visit the Bill’s core document home page and to view the legislation online. Where a Bill has become an Act, a View Act link will be displayed.

You can modify your search from the Quick Search results page and the Advanced Search results page, by clicking Edit Search.

Your previous search parameters will be displayed and can be modified as necessary.

To start again click New Search, or the Quick Search or Advanced Search tabs.