"The Federal Government's decision to give small family businesses a reprieve from unnecessary regulation as part of its privacy protection proposals introduced today is sensible and welcome," Innes Willox, Chief Executive of the national employer association Ai Group said today.
"The public needs confidence that their privacy and data is being handled safely and responsibly, but extending more red tape to low-risk businesses when it is clearly not needed would have severely affected the economy's engine room.
"We are glad the Government has listened to industry concerns and taken a sensible approach and has continued to exclude Small and Medium Enterprises from regulation under the Privacy Act.
"It has also sensibly retained the employee records exemption. This would have had far-reaching and unintended consequences for small businesses by unnecessarily increasing their compliance burden.
"The Government must continue this sensible approach if it goes ahead with a second tranche of changes to the Privacy Act.
"General Data Protection Regulation (EU), is the toughest privacy and security regulation in the world and has informed Australia's new Privacy Regime. Without the exemption, this strict framework would have gone from applying to 80,000 to all of Australia's 2.7 million businesses. It would have quite frankly been a nightmare for Australian small businesses to comply with.
"The workplace has become more complex under recent workplace relations reforms, particularly for our medium size companies. Further unnecessary regulatory creep would only have compounded existing barriers to productivity and investment.
"Ai Group has long advocated for the principle of Data Stewardship and international regulatory cohesion in digital and privacy rules. However, there remains a risk that we make limited facsimiles of external rules, with far reaching consequences in the Australian context, without achieving the benefit of automatic reciprocal coverage," Mr Willox said.
Ai Group's submission to the Privacy Act Review Discussion Paper March 2023
