Inadequate consultation and seemingly unnecessary haste in drafting and passing certain laws has been a shared frustration linking diverse policy issues in the past year.
Meaningful consultation is important in order to understand how a law will be implemented — whether that be national security powers, ehealth records, website blocking or data retention.
Careful scrutiny can bring to light potential unintended consequences of proposed laws, and enable consideration of whether any relinquishment of rights and freedoms are necessary and proportionate. Once enacted, laws are too rarely reviewed, let alone rolled back.
There's too often been a lack of meaningful consultation before some bills are introduced into Parliament, with tight time frames to lodge submissions to parliamentary inquiries, and inadequate time allocated to the parliamentary committee to hold a satisfactory number of public hearings. Such conduct contributes to the erosion of trust in the parliament.
Data retention
In early October last year, in my former role as regulatory manager of iiNet, I responded to a confidential industry consultation paper on the proposed data retention scheme. The Attorney-General's Department provided no response to that 22 page paper beyond an acknowledgment of receipt.
It's frustrating to feel like a government is simply going through the motions of 'consultation'. A few weeks later the data retention bill was introduced into Parliament.
Submissions to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security (PJCIS) on the bill were sought by 19 January — while many were still enjoying summer holidays. Many concerned organisations and individuals weren't given the opportunity to give evidence. The PJCIS held only two days of public hearings after receiving over 200 submissions.
There was no compelling explanation provided for such haste. The bill was passed on 26 March, the last sitting day before the budget period in June.
Site-blocking
That same day, the government introduced the Copyright Amendment (Online Infringement) Bill 2015.
This bill provided that copyright owners could apply to the Federal Court for an order against internet service providers (ISPs) to block access to online locations outside Australia whose primary purpose is to infringe or facilitate the infringement of copyright.
The bill was referred to the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee for inquiry. But with submissions due on 16 April, once again, those engaged in these policy discussions had a very tight time period (just three weeks, which included the Easter break) within which to lodge submissions.
There was just one public hearing (despite 49 submissions being lodged) on the 'site-blocking'