BAW v Department of Justice and Attorney-General, Office of Fair Trading [2015] QCAT 285

Crown Law’s Administrative Law team acted for
the department in successfully resisting one of the few privacy claims decided
by QCAT under the Information Privacy Act
2009 (‘the IP Act’).

BAW was an employee of the department. BAW
had claimed WorkCover benefits on the basis that a proposed co-location of two
business units would result in him sitting near SDD. BAW suspected that SDD had made an anonymous
complaint against BAW and another which BAW considered was ‘homophobic and
vexatious’.

In BAW’s WorkCover
claim, he said that he believed that SDD was the anonymous complainant. For the purposes of reporting to WorkCover on
the claim, the department gave SDD a copy of the claim and included in its
report information SDD gave in response. BAW claimed that this was a breach of privacy.

QCAT decided that the
information privacy principles (IPPs) on which BAW relied had not been breached
because it was appropriate and reasonable for the purposes of reporting to
WorkCover for the Department to disclose the information to SDD and to include SDD’s
response in the report. Because the IPPs
had not been breached, it was not necessary for QCAT to determine the extent to
which the IPPs even applied because of the effect of ss 4, 5 and 7(2) of
the IP Act.