Sources of Legislation and Related Material

Sources

AustLII : The Australasian Legal Information Institute
COMLAWs : Commonwealth of Australia Law incorporating the Federal Register of Legislative Instruments (FRLI).
APRA : The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority
OQPC : Office of the Queensland Parliamentary Counsel

AustLII and COMLAW

The COMLAW site is a recent replacement for the SCALEPlus site.

The AustLII and COMLAW sites provide similar facilities, though their interfaces differ somewhat. Both provide good search facilities and allow legislation to be downloaded.

Most users find the most useful format is the "consolidated legislation", where the act includes all subsequent amendements. However, sometimes recent amendments have not yet been built into the consolidation and should be downloaded separately. Also, for those who really need to know, the original act and individual amendments can be downloaded separately.

In choosing between the sites, the following factors may be helpful.

In addition to commonwealth legislation, AustLII also provides legislation for all states and territories of Australia. COMLAW doesn't, but it does provide links to other sites containing state and territory legislation.
AUSTLII has a more spartan presentation and thus loads faster. Its default presentation for a piece of legislation is a table of sections, while in COMLAW it doesn't seem possible to get to a table of sections without loading the whole piece of legislation. This can be time consuming for long pieces of legislation.
AUSTLII gives a choice of downloads in Rich Text Format (RTF) or ASCII. COMLAW gives a choice of Word, PDF, HTML or RTF.

APRA

APRA issues prudential rules and actuarial standards via its web site.