Currently Australian schools and universities pay a fee when the reproduce materials from government websites. The fees are collected by the Copyright Agency, a non-government non-profit organization and distributed to the copyright holders. It seems reasonable for individual authors and publishers to be paid for use of their work, but does not make a lot of sense for pages copied from government websites, where the government wants maximum distribution of their material.
The Federal and Queensland Governments have open access policies, implemented mostly with a Creative Commons license. If other states were to adopt this policy (and their agencies were to implement it), then schools would not have to pay. That would not require a change in law.
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