The Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Amendment (Data Retention) Bill 2014 was tabled in the Australian Parliament on 30 October 2014. The Bill immediately engendered criticism and controversy that continued through its passage through Parliamentary Committees and debates. Notwithstanding those criticisms and a number of critical reports of Parliamentary Committees, the final Act was passed on 26 March 2015 with bipartisan support of the Federal Coalition and Australian Labor Party and assented to on 13 April 2015.

The Bill was enacted as the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Amendment (Data Retention) Act 2015 (in this article, the ‘2015 Act’) largely as introduced. The 2015 Act principally amends the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979 (‘TIA Act’), which continues to operate under that title. The amendments made to the 2014 Bill increased the level of retrospective review as to access to information required to be collected and maintained. The amendments also introduced new provisions to better shield journalists’ sources that might otherwise be revealed through access to communications data and requirements for prior parliamentary scrutiny of any future expansion in the range of service providers that are required to collect and retain data, the categories of data required to be collected and retained by Australian telecommunications service providers and the range of agencies that might exercise powers of access to that data. However, these amendments otherwise did not significantly revise the scope of the requirements to collect and retain relevant data. As a result, Australia now has the most far-reaching data retention requirements among advanced industrialised democracies to collect and retain data imposed upon telecommunications service providers and has the lowest level of independent scrutiny of proposed exercises by enforcement agencies of powers to access that data.