Researcher says Australian parliaments have failed to protect privacy for 14 years
Long-time – and by now somewhat despondent – privacy advocate Roger Clarke says successive Australian governments have ignored the privacy impacts of nearly every national security measure passed by parliament since 2001.
In this analysis of 72 items of legislation, Clarke finds only around 10 per cent received the normal parliamentary privacy scrutiny.
Privacy impact statements (PIAs) are part of the normal legislative process for any intrusive laws, but Clarke says such assessments have been largely ignored. Clarke told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that only 20 of the 72 measures had any privacy assessment at all, and of those, half were conducted in secret, with no public consultation. Only three, Clarke says, completed the full process, and PIAs were only published for between five and seven measures.
