The Electrical Trades Union is claiming victory over the state government after a magistrate found the union had correctly complied with transparency laws and was not guilty of charges brought against it.

The ETU was charged under the Industrial Relations Act, with the government - through an industrial relations inspector - contending the union failed to produce documents or properly declare its office bearers' credit card statements and earnings, as set down in laws passed by the government last October.

The union set up a website under the domain name opposethesefascistlaws.com to comply with the laws, but the prosecution contended the ETU had failed to comply with certain requirements of the act, failing to produce documents to an inspector and "failing to publish in an approved way certain documents as required by the act".

Magistrate Bernadette Callaghan found the union not guilty on all counts.

“It is up to the prosecution to establish beyond reasonable doubt that the website www.opposethesefascistlaws.com is not the website for the ETUQ and they have not done this,” she said in her judgement.

“The prosecution referred to 'the official' website of the ETUQ being www.etu.org.au and not www.opposethesefascistlaws.com yet there is nothing in the legislation that refers to ‘the official’ website of an organisation or what this might mean – it merely refers to the website of an organisation and there is nothing before the court that would indicate that www.opposethesefascistlaws.com is not a website of the ETUQ.”

Attorney-General Jarrod Bleijie said he was reviewing the decision and would "decide at a later date whether there are grounds for an appeal".

ETU state secretary, Peter Simpson, said the court's decision, which came on the back of the government revoking the need for unions to ballot members before campaigns worth more than $10,000 were launched, led him to believe “the entire transparency and accountability provisions” would be struck out.

In reversing the ballot requirement, Mr Bleijie said the government would wait and see what the outcome of the Royal Commission into union corruption was before moving forward with any other changes.

But Mr Simpson wasn’t so sure.

“This is an Attorney-General that has no clues and is attempting to use his department to ride rough shot over unions to stop successful campaigns such as our Not4Sale campaign,” he said.