Privacy impact assessments as a control mechanism for Australian counter-terrorism initiatives

Democracy in Australia is gravely threatened by a flood of measures harmful to human rights that have been introduced since 2001, a large proportion of which are unjustified and not subject to effective controls. The passage of these measures through the Parliament has been achieved on the basis of their proponents' assertions and without appropriate scrutiny. Parliament had available to it various forms of impact assessment techniques, but failed to require that such methods be applied. The study reported here had as its focus one particular form of evaluation - Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA). The study found that the PIA process should have been performed for each proposal, but was in fact seldom applied, and where it was applied the process and report were in almost all cases seriously deficient. Survival of democracy is dependent on the Parliament standing up to the national security extremism that has taken hold of the Attorney-General's Department. Ministers and Parliamentary Committees must demand prior evaluation of proposals that restrict civil freedoms, must ensure transparency in relation to the proposals and their justification, and must require effective controls over, and mitigation features within, those measures that survive the evaluation process.