On the 3rd of February 2023 the office of the Australian formation commissioner, OAIC, provided submissions to the Commonwealth government, supporting changes to the current legislation written under the Privacy Act of 1988 and other legislations.
Recommendations to address these aspects of the Privacy Act included extraterritorial operations, Changes to the notifiable data breach scheme and also increasing penalties to business under the competition and consumer ACT.
The OAIC intention is to increase the penalties to encourage compliance which businesses will be enforcing and Improvement of their systems and responsible handling of personnel data . The commissioner stated , the “ increased penalties which will help to incentivise compliance and ensure that penalties for privacy breaches act as a deterrent and are not seen merely as the cost of doing business in Australia”
