“THE PUBLIC rightly expects any personal information collected and stored by business – whether they are large or small – will be protected,” Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman, Bruce Billson has said in support of a Federal Government decision to remove a privacy exemption for the sector.

Mr Billson said he supported the decision by Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus to remove the privacy exemption for small business and is working with the Australian Government to ensure new regulations are “right-sized and appropriate” for small business, easy to implement, with clear advice and timelines “and will give confidence to customers”. 

“It is not credible for small business to have a blanket exemption from providing necessary and appropriate protection of the personal information they have about their customers, staff and other businesses they are dealing with,” Mr Billson said.  

“To make this change work and to provide confidence to the community, we need to have right-sized and appropriate requirements that are readily implementable by a small business.  

“While the exemption is no longer tenable, nor is it practical to apply to full suite of privacy principles to a small business – principles that big business and government agencies need to decipher, interpret and apply to their circumstances which a small or family business can never hope to have the resources or staff to navigate and implement.” 

Mr Billson said he welcomed the Attorney-General's acknowledgement of the special circumstances and limited time and resources of small business and that the exemption would only be removed following an impact analysis once what replaces it has been determined through consultation with the small business community, consideration of a support package and a transition period giving small businesses time to prepare. 

“We have been engaging constructively with the Attorney-General and his department and look forward to continuing to do so to establish a right-sized, actionable, fit-for-purpose and efficient approach to privacy protections and personal information management with appropriate support and guidance,” Mr Billson said. 

“Small businesses will need clear guidance on the active steps they can take to protect the information of their customers, their staff and themselves and to fulfil their responsibilities. This may include procedural templates, information guides and checklists explaining the clear steps required to meet their privacy obligations. 

“And it would be sensible to join this up with other important reforms around cyber risk management, Digital ID, payment times, deepening the digital engagement of small business and the responsible use of artificial intelligence (AI). 

“Small businesses themselves know they can lose business if customers lose confidence in their ability to protect personal information and will benefit from increased certainty around the way information is being managed and protected. 

“A cyber hack or malicious information release is harmful at many levels, including for the targeted small business as it can irreparably damage the businesses’ ability to operate and it may never recover or re-earn the confidence of its employees, customers, suppliers and partners.”

MASTER BUILDERS Australia has acknowledged that the Federal Government’s announcement of changes to the Building Code result from it taking its policy to abolish the Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC) to the electorate at the recent Federal Election.

Master Builders Australia CEO Denita Wawn said she was also cognizant that the Federal Government has not yet released the detail of the regulatory framework that it plans to put in place for the industry going forward.

“However, we continue to call on the government not to depart from decades of bipartisan recognition that the building and construction industry requires industry specific regulation and oversight,” Ms Wawn said. 

“This is particularly important at this precarious time for our economy and people’s standard of living when all Federal Government action should be about fighting inflation, protecting growth, and boosting productivity.  Leaving the construction sector without a specialist regulator will fail this test.

“Abolishing the ABCC cannot be separated from the economy and economic management. Making changes to the industrial relations system is one of the strongest economic levers that any government has at its disposal and abolishing the construction industry watchdog will have substantial negative flow on effects,” Ms Wawn said.

“Economic modelling by EY has found that scrapping a specialist construction regulator will drive up inflation just when the Reserve Bank is increasing interest rates to tackle inflation and will result in a reduction in economic activity by $47.5 billion by 2030.

“It also found that it will drive up the cost of constructing the substantial pipeline of infrastructure including health, defence, aged care, and transport projects costing taxpayers in the order of $9.5 billion by 2029 and result in an estimated reduction in investment in infrastructure of $45.6 billion by 2030,” Ms Wawn said.

“When the Rudd Government commissioned the late Murray Willcox AO QC to inquire into the creation of specialist regulatory division for building and construction work the Willcox Report found that “the ABCC’s work is not yet done” and recommended a specialist construction regulatory agency which retained many of the powers of the ABCC.

“We understand this action by the Rudd Government caused intense resentment in the union movement, but the retention of a specialist construction industry regulator was the right public policy response then and remains so now,” Ms Wawn said.

“Going back decades Labor and Coalition governments at a state and federal level have implemented industry specific measures aimed at improving the performance of the construction industry.

“Tackling the extreme militancy found only in construction unions has also received long standing bipartisan support. It was Labor Governments at the federal and state level which abolished the notorious Builders Labourers Federation,” Ms Wawn said.

“These measures were not focussed on discouraging the flying of construction union flags on construction sites but responded to the overwhelming evidence that construction unions use unlawful industrial tactics to bully, intimidate and coerce people working in the construction industry to sign up to union deals,” she said.

“The critics of the ABCC cannot simply ignore the continuous succession of Federal Court judgements documenting this reality.

“Master Builders welcomes the government’s announcement that litigation commenced by the ABCC will be managed by the Fair Work Ombudsman,” she said.

“Importantly, the government deserves commendation for its recognition of the vital role that the Office of the Federal Safety Commissioner plays in improving safety culture and outcomes in the construction industry,” Ms Wawn said.

THE OPENING arguments in Youth Verdict and The Bimblebox Alliance’s human rights, nature and climate legal challenge to Clive Palmer’s proposed Galilee Coal Project will be heard from today at the Queensland Land Court.

The Queensland Land Court will hear what Youth Verdict and The Bimblebox Alliance has called "compelling evidence that the Mining Lease and Environmental Approval for the mine should be refused". 

Represented by the Environmental Defenders Office, Youth Verdict and The Bimblebox Alliance will argue coal from the mine will impact the human rights of First Nations Peoples by contributing to dangerous climate change. They will also argue the mine would destroy the Bimblebox Nature Refuge which sits on top of the proposed mine site. 

In a legal first, First Nations people in Gimuy/Cairns and the Torres Strait Islands of Erub and Poruma will give evidence to the Land Court on Country and in accordance with First Nations protocols.

The court will travel to the traditional lands of First Nations witnesses to hear first-hand "how climate change is impacting their lives and what will be lost if climate change is worsened by the burning of coal from new mines, including the Galilee Coal Project".

Youth Verdict’s First Nations-led argument is the first time a coal mine has been challenged on human rights grounds in Australia.

According to Waratah Coal's website statement, "The Galilee Coal Project (Northern Export Facility) consists of two open cut operations and four underground longwall mining operations, coal handling preparation plants and a rail transportation network to Abbot Point and a proposed port facility at Abbot Point. The project intends to mine 56 Mtpa [million tonnes per anum] of run-of-mine (ROM) coal, which will be later processed to produce 40 Mtpa of product coal. The project will initially commence operations with a 10 Mtpa open cut mine, eventually ramping up to 56 Mtpa several years later."

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By Leon Gettler, Talking Business >>

THERE ARE TWO seismic changes that have modified Australian workplaces and which challenge employment law, according to leading Australian employment and industrial law barrister Ian Neil SC.

The first is the way employees can work from home. The second is JobKeeper. Both will have implications for years to come, Mr Neil said.

The prospect of many people now working from home, across all industries, being reluctant to come back in the office to work full time will have enormous commercial implications.

“The central business districts of our large cities will probably never be the same as they were before the pandemic,” Mr Neil told Talking Business. 

“It also has profound implication for the way work is organised and I would suggest, finally, deep pervasive implications for the way employers and their employees relate to one another.”

JOBKEEPER IN THE SHADOWS

Similarly, the implications of JobKeeper will last for years, despite the Federal Government now winding it back.

“With income support on such a large scale, once it’s been done once, it becomes easier to do it again, and perhaps to do it in different circumstance,” Mr Neil said.

“It’s affected a revolution, I would say, in that it’s overturned the consensus over the last 15 to 20 years, the no-liberal consensus, about the role of government in our society, in our economy and in relation to people’s employment.

“Now once that consensus is overturned in that way, the implications of it remain. They will sit there.”

That means we will not be going back to an age of smaller government.

“We’ve seen attempts by our Federal Government to sell the idea that it’s time for governments to step back, that the Australian people don’t want governments to play such a large role in their lives as they have over the last two years but that message does not seem to have resonated and rather, seems to have foundered on events,” Mr Neil said.

“The floods in northern NSW and Queensland are a perfect example of that.”

WORKING FROM HOME CONUNDRUMS

Mr Neil said people ‘working from home’ raised a number of important occupational health and safety issues that the law still has to grapple with in a conclusive way.

“Once you have employees working from home, then for all practical legal purposes, at least while they are performing work, the worker’s home becomes a place of work,” Mr Neil said. “And because it’s a place of work, it attracts the stringent statutory and other obligations that all employers have to provide safe places of work for their employees and workers.

“Now that is an extraordinary idea if you think about it, the idea that employers have a legal responsibility to ensure that if their employees are working from home, those homes are safe places to work.”

Mr Neil cited one case where a woman was tragically murdered by her partner and that case was held to be covered by workers’ compensation legislation because her home was a place of work.

“If you think about it, it’s easy to see how the notion that employers have that kind of responsibility is revolutionary,” he said.

This raises a number of issues for employers. How do they ensure their workers’ home is a safe place to work? What steps do they take? What powers of control and direction do they have?

The question of whether an employee can refuse coming into work will largely be determined by the growing trend of society now ‘living with COVID’.

“An employee will be no more at risk by coming to work than they will be going to the shops, or moving about the streets or going to a cinema,” Mr Neil said.

“There may be some places of work that pose some special risks, working in close proximity to other workers in unventilated workplaces and so on, but they will be rare.”

www.inaneil.com

www.leongettler.com

Hear the complete interview and catch up with other topical business news on Leon Gettler’s Talking Business podcast, released every Friday at www.acast.com/talkingbusiness.

https://play.acast.com/s/talkingbusiness/talking-business10-interview-with-ian-neil-sc

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