Is a monumental email fail a breach of the Privacy Act?

It's happened to all of us – that inadvertent 'reply all' in which you ridicule the managing partner's male pattern baldness, or email the wrong Darren who receives a link to a cat Vine instead of your learned legal advice.

In what must be one of the grandest email stuff-ups of all time, just prior to the recent G20 Summit an employee at the Commonwealth Department of Immigration and Border Protection inadvertently emailed personal details of several world leaders to the wrong person. Yes, WORLD LEADERS. And we're talking really serious ones like the Presidents of the US, China and India, and Mr Putin (who we believe is quite prone to crankiness). Details included name, date of birth, passport and visa numbers. The pesky autofill function in Outlook was to blame.