Those legal constraints are strong and important in Australia. As you say, the obstacles to a climate in which there is much greater disclosure and re-used circulation of government information include the privacy act, the copyright principles, national security, and other secrecy provisions.
All of those legal constraints still exist, but I suppose what is occurring is two things. One, we now have a climate in which we're addressing more directly the obstacles those can pose to more transparent government. For example, there is active discussion between my office and the Attorney General's department--which has policy responsibility for copyright protection--on the need to move more to a creative commons kind of licensing framework so that government agencies, when they publish information online, publish it without any copyright restrictions on the re-use of that information by others.
A simple example is government has to understand that when it publishes all its social demographic data, commercial organizations like Google will be well poised, if there are no copyright restrictions, to download that and then upload it onto iPhones and Google Maps and the like in a way that enables much better integration of government information into commercial programs.
The other big change, I suppose, is that it's as much an attitude as well as the legal constraints that hold back transparent government. It's the tendency of government to grasp a privacy justification for not disclosing, or a tendency to grasp a national security justification or a copyright justification for not disclosing. Often the case is overstated.
Because there is this commitment to open government--