Joe Ludwig (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Manager of Government Business in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

The difficulty—and this is why we came back to the issue of not defining—is that, depending on the type of operation that a network operator conducts, they will undertake their own network protection duties, which may vary depending on the organisation, the size of the organisation, the sophistication of the organisation and the types of services that the organisation provides. The point is to try to move away from a definition which pins it down, because you might in fact be imposing duties on some organisations that do not actually require or do not undertake that work. If they are feeling a little pressed about trying to work out how to meet their network protection duties, they can always go to the Attorney-General for a clarification. The difficulty always with trying to provide a prescriptive definition is that, as I indicated earlier, you run into a range of problems by inadvertently limiting activities or, alternatively, by imposing activities on organisations that may be able to meet the network protection duties in some other way. So, by and large, industries will be able to provide that type of protection themselves.