Bridget McKenzie (Victoria, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

That is a lot of schools. That is a lot of teachers. Yet here we are. We are moving to scrap more than 10,000 unnecessary and counterproductive pieces of legislation and regulations. More than 50,000 pages of unnecessary and costly legislation that are a dead weight on business, community groups and households will go. The benefit will be significant. Removing these alone will save individuals and organisations more than $700 million a year—every single year.

Senator Cameron interjecting—

That saving, Senator Cameron, can actually be translated into things that I am sure you and the members of the AMWU will be concerned about: actual jobs. When we take the burden off business and when we ensure that the regulatory environment they are operating in gives them more cash in their hand, what they can do is employ the workers of Australia. They can actually get on with doing what they do well, which is producing fabulous product, produce and services, and get on with making our nation's economic base stronger. As I said, we will cut red tape costs by $1 billion a year. We are doing what we said we would do. What a direct contrast to those opposite. We are doing what we said we would do. This week had the first of what will be many days of repealing red tape—and hallelujah to that.

The bill before us today does raise a concern that not all regulation is bad. There are points where a government needs to ensure that appropriate regulation exists, and getting the balance right in this particular space is important to protect the privacy of the individual. Similarly, I was lucky to be on the cybersafety working group, and one of those areas that we looked at was how to get the balance right between ensuring the safety of young people and of young Australian children in the cyber environment. It is something that is responding directly to the concerns of Australian parents and, indeed, young people themselves. That does require very light regulation around how to get the balance right to ensure that we can take down quite quickly offensive material that damages and harms our young people. I have got several local examples in Victoria where the appropriate existing mechanisms were followed. I am thinking about a young girl of 12 where there was material up for a year on the website even though repeated requests had been made for it to be taken down. So there is a real need for appropriate regulation, and this may be an area where that exists. However, the way the Labor Party have proceeded to consult, to get their head around the issue and then formulate a cohesive policy response, again, beggars belief, but I should not be surprised—I feel like a broken record at times. When we talk about the process of consultation that the Labor Party underwent with the bill before us today, as I mentioned earlier, submissions opened on the 18th and closed on the 20th. When you are looking at privacy legislation, that is pretty private. In fact I do not think it gets much more private than that. That is what you do for preselection when you do not want anyone to nominate. That might be a tactic that is used more on the opposition side than on this side.

In relation to data breaches the legislation before us seeks to amend the Privacy Act 1988 to establish a framework for the mandatory notification by government agencies and certain private organisations to notify the Australian Information Commissioner and affected individuals of serious data breaches involving their personal information. Mandatory data breach notification commonly refers to a legal requirement to provide notice to affected persons and to the relevant regulator when certain types of personal information is accessed, obtained, used, disclosed, copied or modified by unauthorised persons. Such unauthorised access may occur following a malicious breach of the secure storage and handling of that information, for instance through a hacker attack, an accidental loss, most commonly of IT equipment or hard copy documents, a negligent or improper disclosure of information or otherwise. A data breach arises when there has been unauthorised access for this sort of information.

As I said earlier, a bill very similar to this was considered by the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee and was reported on 24 June 2013.

Senator Cameron interjecting—

Senator Bilyk interjecting—