Privacy and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2024
7 November 2024
The Law Council provided a submission to the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee in response to its inquiry into the Privacy and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2024.
Our submission was informed by the expertise and guidance of our Business Law Section, National Human Rights Committee, and several Constituent Bodies. We are grateful for the ongoing contributions of our membership in respect of these significant and complex privacy reforms.
In our submission, we emphasised our strong support for the urgent strengthening and modernisation of Australia’s privacy regime and indicated support for the timely passage of the Bill, subject to the various recommendations we made, including that (in respect of Schedule 1):
- the Government must release a roadmap to outline its specific intentions for further tranches of reform arising out of the Privacy Act Review Report, including indicative timeframes;
- the breadth of the exclusion of health service providers under Item 32 of Schedule 1 to the Bill, with respect to the Children’s Online Privacy Code, should be narrowed to exclude counselling services only, not health services more generally;
- Part 6 of Schedule 1 to the Bill should be amended to add a limitation to existing subsection 5B(3) of the Privacy Act that confines the scope of the extraterritorial application of the Privacy Act, such as to ‘personal information from a source in Australia’; and
- the provisions in Part 15 of Schedule 1 to the Bill that refer to ‘substantially and directly related to making a decision’ should be redrafted to ensure that they do not apply beyond what is intended.
In respect of Schedule 2 to the Bill, our submission recommended that these provisions be redrafted to ensure that the parameters of the proposed statutory tort for serious invasions of privacy are sufficiently clear and precise, and are, by extension, fit-for-purpose.
In addition, we recommended that Schedule 3 to the Bill should be redrafted to address concerns regarding the doxxing offences being drafted too broadly; the need for guidance on what constitutes ‘menacing’ or ‘harassing’ behaviour; and the lack of differentiation between penalties for the release of certain types of ‘personal data’.
The Committee is due to report by 14 November 2024. We look forward to engaging with the Committee’s recommendations and monitoring the progress of the Bill in the Senate, including any amendments brought.
Last Updated on 06/11/2024