Re: New Victorian tourist railway rules

[G.Lambert@unsw.edu.au (Geoff Lambert)]

steam4me@enternet.com.au (Yuri J Sos) wrote:

>dbromage@metz.une.edu.au (David Bromage) wrote:

>>Revised and reprinted Tourist Railway Rules and General Instructions took
>>    SNIP
>> I can't give all the details as the document is restricted
>>and copyright, but I can outline a few of the major changes.

>It's not 1st April so I can ask:  if the Rules are "restricted"
>information, how do the many volunteers who work on all these Tourist
>Railways find out what the Rules are? (Or... "Restricting" this
>document to those volunteers probably means that only 90% of the
>railfan movement will know what these mysterious "Rules" are).

>Silly me, I thought Rules worked best when they were promulgated
>widely so that everyone knew what the Rules were and knew what they
>were obeying/disobeying<g!>

>Yuri

Well, until recently, most railway rule-books were delegated
legislation.  They were laws of the land.  They did not, and could
not, carry "confidential" provisions.  Indeed, you could consider
that, in the ultimate analysis, everyone in the country was obliged to
know them ("ignorance of the law is no excuse").

With a change to railways' structures, the requirement that the
rulebook be delegated legislation has been rescinded (except in
Western Australia, where both Government and mining railway rule books
are still essentially pseudo-statutory instruments).  What this has
meant for secrecy is a bit hard to determine.  Some rulebooks
themselves carry a clause saying that it is a prosecutable offence for
an employee "to reveal the content of documents or to show any
outsider a working manual".  I do not know whether the"Tourist Railway
Rules and General Instructions " have been issued under Statute,
delegated legislation, or something more shadowy.  At any rate, they
would seem to have some degree of Government sanction or control and
that would therefore make it highly unlikely that secrecy provisions
could apply- secrecy has generally only been applied to government
Regulations in matters of national security (e.g. ASIS has regulations
governing it, but you're not allowed to know what they are, or even
whether they exist)

But, for tourist railways, as Monty Python might say, "Quite agree-
silly, silly, silly", especially for railways carrying members of the
public.

Geoff Lambert