NSWCCL made a submission to the Senate Finance and Public Administration Committees Inquiry into the Data Availability and Transparency Bill 2020 [Provisions] and Data Availability and Transparency (Consequential Amendments) Bill 2020 [Provisions].
In our view, this Bill is fundamentally flawed and violates community expectations of how private personal information is treated.
It gives a green light for government agencies to share data with each other and makes the private sector exempt from the law (Australian Privacy Principle 6) which governs and limits how personal information is used and shared. This will have enormous consequences for individuals and is unnecessary to achieve the aims of delivering better government services, informing government programs and research.
The Privacy Act was initially enacted to regulate the activities of Commonwealth agencies – only later was it extended to the private sector. To exempt agencies from a key principle would fundamentally undermine the original purpose of the Act.
The latest Government survey of Australians’ privacy concerns shows 84% consider it to be a misuse of their information when they supply it to an organisation for a specific purpose and it is then used for another purpose. Yet this is exactly what this Bill proposes to make possible.
For more: read our full submission
