What happened on Tuesday 22 November, 2022
With that, we’ll wrap up our live coverage of the day’s news.
Here’s a summary of the day’s main news developments:
The first six refugees to be resettled in New Zealand from Australia’s offshore processing regime on Nauru have landed in Auckland.
Electric cars are set to become cheaper and government fleets will go green after members of the crossbench struck a deal to pass a Labor bill and phase out public support for petrol-based plug-in vehicles.
Anthony Albanese received a mixed reception as he visited flood-hit Eugowra in New South Wales.
The strong winds that have battered much of south-east Australia are due to ease after days of damaging gusts.
Serial protester Danny Lim has been left bloodied and seeking hospital treatment after a “discontinued” arrest by NSW police officers in the Sydney CBD on Tuesday.
Buildings were left damaged and widespread power outages were reported in the Solomon Islands capital, Honiara, after two earthquakes struck just off the south-west coast on Tuesday.
Ahead of the Socceroos’ opening World Cup match against France, the Australian coach, Graham Arnold, will rely on his players to have each other’s backs when they meet the millionaire world champions. The match kicks off at 6am AEDT on Wednesday.
Thanks for reading. Have a pleasant evening (and early rise for those waking up for the Socceroos match). We’ll be back to do it all again tomorrow.
Updated
Review into laws that could see businesses fined $50m for data breaches recommends legislation be passed
A Senate committee reviewing legislation that would bring on up to $50m in penalties for businesses that suffer data breaches has recommended the legislation pass the parliament.
The Labor-majority committee made just three recommendations after the review of the legislation in the wake of the Optus and Medibank data breaches. The recommendations ask the attorney general’s department to define “serious” and “repeated” interference in the Privacy Act, and to consider whether to more tightly define what an “Australian link” should be for companies to be covered by the legislation if Australian data is held by that company.
But the committee recommended that this form part of the department’s review of the Privacy Act – due for a government response by the end of this year.
The LNP senator Paul Scarr supported the recommendations, but suggested wording around “benefits” that companies might get out of data breaches should be changed in determining the size of penalties given, because it would not cover businesses that were wilfully reckless or grossly negligent and then suffered data breaches.
The Greens senator David Shoebridge made similar comments, but also said the $50m fine amount would be seen as a “nuclear option” and one that could lead to disastrous results. He said there should be a tiered fine system.
Shoebridge also raised concerns about the capacity for the office of the Australian information commissioner to launch investigations – given the Optus breach will cost the office $5.5m to investigate.
He said:
With a total budget of just over $33m annually, from which all of the FoI and privacy work must be undertaken there is an obvious lack of practical
capacity for the OAIC to undertake any more than one serious privacy breach investigation at a time.This lack of financial capacity is even clearer when you consider that the FoI work is already chronically delayed and underfunded, causing year-long delays in resolving reviews.
The end result may well be that the parliament agrees to tougher penalties but the government starves the regulator of the funds to ever seriously enforce them. That, at best, is a pyrrhic victory for data security.
Updated
