Technology impacts across the breadth of the economy.

The tech sector’s work to create and deploy tools and services that support citizens and businesses to enhance their ways of working, goes hand in hand with the criticality of technology to the entire economy. As such, ensuring public policy recognises, embraces and appropriately responds to technology is essential if Australia is to optimise its opportunity to be a leading digital economy.

We have three priorities for regulation:

• Be a digital economy regulation leader by encouraging the safe and early introduction of new products and services with fit-for-purpose regulation
• Institute clear and proportionate frameworks for privacy and data protection
• Pass security laws that protect but don’t unnecessarily inhibit

Australia can be a leader in digital economy regulation. We work collaboratively with governments, businesses and the community to design regulatory frameworks and policies design safe and effective regulation that enables the introduction of new products and services, and supports growth, investment and jobs.

Public policy settings that relate directly to technology companies are important, but equally important are regulatory settings across the economy. These must be workable in a tech-enabled economy, and should encourage further growth and job creation through leverage of technology driven gains. 

Two economy wide areas where we are initially focussed are privacy and security. In this and our broader regulatory work, we look forward to working collaboratively with Government to design regulatory frameworks that are fit for purpose.

• Privacy and data protection: Clear yet flexible privacy laws that underpin consumer trust, support international trade and facilitate workable business practices are essential to a well functioning Australian economy. We support a framework that gives consumers control over their personal information, as well as the tools to control it.
• Security laws that protect but don’t unnecessarily inhibit: We support appropriate law enforcement powers that facilitate work with technology companies to combat crime. These powers need to be proportionate in scope and depth, as well as subject to robust oversight.

As the Government conducts its review of the Privacy Act and its work on security initiatives, we look forward to engaging and contributing to the development of robust frameworks.