Information about the relative performance of Australian schools in national literacy and numeracy tests is now freely available on the Federal Government's My School website.

And newspapers in every other state of Australia are allowed to publish the information as it relates to readers and schools in their circulation areas.

But thanks to Mr O'Farrell's decision to back a Greens amendment to routine state government legislation last year, newspapers can be fined $55,000 for publishing what anybody can read on the internet.

Mr O'Farrell's decision runs counter to his usual rhetoric about transparency and freedom of information.

While debate rages between Federal Education Minister Julia Gillard and teachers over the school rating system on the website, the ban on NSW newspapers publishing the results when they are available online is ludicrous.

One newspaper, The Sydney Morning Herald, has defied the law, publishing some data about the performance of particular schools and daring the Liberal leader to take them to court. So far he has declined to do so.

Under the law, however, any person may initiate a prosecution, raising the possibility that someone with a vested interest in concealing a particular school's poor results might expensively avenge the exposure of those results by taking a newspaper to court.

The stupidity of the state law is remarkable. It explicitly provides for state school results to be passed to the Federal Government in the full knowledge that these will be posted on the internet and made available in other states. Having done that, it then imposes prohibitive fines on any media organisation in NSW that reveals the results.

It has been suggested that the Greens-O'Farrell amendment may be counter to implied guarantees of freedom of speech referred to at times by the High Court.