Use these fields if you know the Year or Number of the legslation.

All searches will be conducted as if the legislation was consolidated at the given date. Date must be entered in the following format dd/mm/yyyy

Note that for most legislation there are no consolidations present prior to 1 February 1997. Searching before this date will give results, but the results shown will be for the earliest consolidation held in the system.

Clicking on the icon next to the Legislation Title will allow you to see a list of all of the Subordinate Legislation which has been made under that Act, after May 1998.

If more than 20 titles match your search, the results will be broken down into a series of pages. For the example shown there were 65 titles matching the search, which are displayed over 4 pages of results.

To move through the results, click on a page NUMBER, or the PREVIOUS or NEXT links shown at the bottom of the results list.

Type in the keyword to be used in the search. Click the arrow to perform the search.

Using the syntax FIELD=word, the search can be restricted to individual fields. Useful fields in this database include:

•  FragText - The full text of each fragment.
•  Title - The full title of the document (Note this treats the whole title as a single search term so "?" is very useful).
•  ActNo - Act Numbers.
•  SRNo - Statutory Rule Numbers.
•  Year - Year of Act or Statutory Rule etc

  
  Example: Title=criminal and FragText=appeal
  

? means any number of characters, # means exactly one character.

Example: fee?  - would match "fee","feedlots","fees"

Example: wom#n - would match "woman" or "women"

The @fuzzy() function finds all terms like the one being searched for:

Example: @fuzzy(center)   - would match "center", and "centre"

The fuzziness defaults to 75% but can be adjusted (65-85 gives best results):

Example: @fuzzy=50(center)   - matches "cent" as well

The @stem() function matches singular and plural forms of the word:

Example: @stem(lies)   - would match "lie", as well as "lies"

If you want to search for a phrase, just enter the terms next to each other.

Example: right of appeal

If you want to search for two words near each other then the "%" or the "!" characters can be used to indicate the number of words you will allow between the two terms.

Example, for terms within 3 words of each other in either order: right %3 appeal
Example, for terms within 3 words of each other preserving order: right !3 appeal
Example, showing the difference: (right %3 appeal) not (right !3 appeal)

The entries in the Table of Contents are hypertext links, so you may navigate by clicking on entries in that Table of Contents window.

Clicking on the Title allows you to see the legislation that you are currently viewing as one single large document, instead of a collection of pages. This operation can take some time for large pieces of legislation, as the consolidation must be calculated on the fly.

Print Page will open the piece of legislation (whole, part or section) in a format suitable for printing

The CHANGES OVER TIME table appears at the bottom of the legislation you are viewing, when there is more than one version of that provision available.
It allows you to move to historical versions of the provision at different points in time.

To describe the required URL structure, consider the following HTML mark-up that creates a link to the current consolidation of the Police Offences Act 1935 (No.44 of 1935):

<a href="http://www.thelaw.tas.gov.au/linkto.w3p;doc_id=44++1935+AT@EN+CURRENT">Police Offences Act 1935 (No.44 of 1935)</a>

The example HTML would be rendered to a hyper-text link like this:

Police Offences Act 1935 (No.44 of 1935)

The URL directs the browser to the linkto.w3p page and includes the doc_id parameter that specifies the legislation and consolidation to be viewed. The doc_id parameter is a formatted string that encodes the Act or Statutory Rule number, the Act or Statutory Rule year, the location within the document, and the consolidation date. Each component is separated by the + character:

ACT_NO+STAT_RULE_NO+YEAR+LOCATION_IN_DOCUMENT+VALID_DATE

For example, the doc_id parameter to reference to the Police Offences Act 1935, consolidated as at February 1, 1997 is encoded as follows:

44++1935+AT@EN+1997020100

Note that the Act numbers and Statutory Rule numbers are mutually exclusive; a reference to a Stat Rule (in this example, the Child Care (Fees) Regulations 2003 (S.R. 2003, No. 70) as at 11 December 2003) is encoded like this:

+70+2003+AT@EN+2003121100

The LOCATION_IN_DOCUMENT field is a code used within the document to give each position in the document an identifier that can be referenced. AT@EN means the Title location in the document and is used when the whole document is targeted. GS1@EN means section 1, GS2@EN means section 2, JS1@EN means schedule 1, etc. To find out more codes, run your cursor over the links from the table of contents to the documents in the component view screen, and you will see the codes in the URL.