This Newsletter provides a brief ‘policy news’ update, preceded by the Renewals Notice.

1. Renewals

APF runs on a financial-year cycle, so renewals fall due on 1 July. If you are an annual member rather than life-member, would you please remit your renewal fee, and any donation you may wish to make, to:

Australian Privacy Foundation
Bendigo Bank
BSB 633-000
A/c 126 879 162
Please include the name in which your membership is registered.
Please advise us by email if your preferred email address has changed.

Annual Fee – $40     Concession Fee – $10     Life Membership – $275

Thanks to everyone for your support! We’re gradually moving towards the point at which we can use paid support to monitor opportunities to influence policy, and coordinate drafting of statements and submissions.

A note to recently-joined members: We generally treat those who join after 1 March as being members until the next-but-one 30th of June, i.e. if you joined within the last few months, it won’t be necessary for you to renew until next year’s notice.

If required, here is further information, or email me direct.

2. Current Policy Work

The COVID era has seen no let-up in the privacy issues confronting us. It’s even provided some additional opportunities for social control devotees to seek yet more powers over individuals’ lives.

APF members have been active on COVID-related privacy issues from the outset. A new contributor, Tom Lawrence, has consolidated and summarised the arguments, resulting in the following Policy Statement:

Here are the APF’s many other Policy Statements.

It’s been a very busy half-year for policy work. This has been particularly the case in the health space, where rejoined Health Committee Chair, (Dr) Juanita Fernando, has followed up the strong work of the Chair for the last 6 years, (Dr) Bernard Robertson-Dunn, with a series of submissions to multiple agencies.

Here is the submissions-index.

The government-driven project to implement a so-called Consumer Data Right (which is actually a Corporate Data Right to Consumers’ Data) started out with promises of strong consumer protections.

With industry, particularly the much-hyped FinTech sector, very lukewarm about it, the hard-right has now grabbed control of the agenda. Treasury is tearing the consumer protections out of the scheme, in the hope that the removal of the key regulatory elements will attract companies into a wild-west, gold-rush frenzy to exploit consumers.

APF initially fought for protections for consumers’ data; but the scheme is now so bad that there’s no option but to outright oppose it.

Roger Clarke
Secretary, for the APF Board
Board Membership and Contact-Points