Publication
Challenges to the validity of local council levies
The way that local councils issue special levies, and deal with errors made in the passing of those levies, has come under spotlight in the recent High Court of Australia decision.
Global | Publication | April 13, 2016
As mentioned in our previous legal update, the Attorney-General’s Department has released an exposure draft of the Australian Government’s promised mandatory data breach notification bill. The Attorney-General’s Department sought comments on an exposure draft of the Privacy Amendment (Notification of Serious Data Breaches) Bill 2015 (Cth) (Exposure Bill). The time for submissions has now closed and the Attorney-General’s Department has published a number of the non-confidential submissions in relation to the Exposure Bill on its website.
The published submissions were made by 45 separate organisations, agencies and individuals, including:
Many of the submissions raised similar issues, including:
The Attorney-General’s Department is likely to take some time to consider the submissions and may recommend changes to the Exposure Bill before it is introduced to Federal Parliament. Given recent forecasts of an early Federal election, it remains to be seen how a possible election could affect the progress of a bill through the Federal Parliament.
In the event that a bill is introduced into Parliament but does not pass through both houses prior to an election, the bill will lapse on the dissolution of Parliament. This was the fate of the previous Privacy Amendment (Privacy Alerts) Bill 2013 (Cth) under the former Labor government.
However, notwithstanding a possible early election, there is every indication that the introduction of a mandatory data breach notification regime has the support of the major political parties. We still consider it likely that a bill will be introduced to Parliament and passed during the course of this year, with the law to take effect in late 2017.
Accordingly, organisations should continue to be pro-active in this area and should start preparing for the introduction of mandatory data breach notification obligations as part of their overall cyber-risk management strategy.
As part of being able to effectively manage cyber-risk, organisations will need to have a data breach response plan setting out what to do if a breach occurs. Many breaches arise from weaknesses in vendors’ systems, rather than organisations’ own systems. It is therefore also important to have a vendor cyber-risk management framework in place. Our Australian Privacy and Cyber-risk Team has worked with our colleagues overseas to develop two fixed price global best practice cyber-risk management packages to address these issues. Please contact us for further details.
Publication
The way that local councils issue special levies, and deal with errors made in the passing of those levies, has come under spotlight in the recent High Court of Australia decision.
Publication
On 22 February 2024, Belgium became the EU frontrunner in the fight against ecocides by being the first EU member state to criminalise ecocide, in the new Belgian Criminal Code.
Publication
The Pensions Regulator’s General Code has arrived and will apply from March 27, 2024. In this briefing, we take a step back from the detail. We set out why the General Code really matters and how pension scheme trustees can best make it work for them.
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