Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I understand that there are some carveouts for health service providers and for credit reporting agencies, as well as a couple of other carveouts. In the writs attached to the explanatory memorandum, the government is boasting that the proposed scheme will only apply to around six per cent of Australian businesses. So 94 per cent of Australian businesses will not be caught by this bill. I do not understand why it should relate to turnover rather than the fact that some of these small businesses will hold considerable amounts of people's private information, and, yet, that will be exempt from the bill. Rather than just a blanket statement that it would be unwieldy for them, why not move, as the Australian Privacy Foundation and many others have pointed out, to have the threshold be related to harm to the user base rather than to turnover of the small business? I genuinely do not understand why the government has gone that way.