Penny Wright (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

That really highlights the confusion and the difficulty of around this. I do not profess to be an expert in this area by any means, but I am guided by concerns that have been raised by people who have a lot more knowledge about it than I. I am going back to concerns that were articulated when this bill was considered by the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights. Among other things, this legislation engages the right of privacy, and the committee's 20th report actually states that the committee acknowledges the desirability of having a definition of 'content' which would therefore be excluded from the requirement for retention but is capable of keeping pace with technological changes. The committee expressed concern that without a clear definition of 'content' there is the potential that what constitutes content could be interpreted restrictively so that the scope of data to be retained is broader than what is required to achieve the government's stated objective. In other words, the scope of the dataset to be retained may be disproportionate to the objective which is to be achieved.

The reason I have raised the issue of metatags is that the committee noted that the bill could potentially see data retained that does actually include aspects of content. The example given was the idea of metatags, which are used by website developers to provide search engines with information about their sites and may contain significant information about a website, including aspects of its content. However, it is unclear whether it is intended that metatags will be prescribed in the regulations as data to be retained for the purposes of the scheme. I think it is a fair question to ask the Attorney-General whether or not metatags will be prescribed in the regulations as data to be retained for the purposes of the scheme.