Submission in response to Australian Law Reform Commission Issues Paper 31 – Review of Privacy

Anglicare is not responding to the entirety of the discussion paper but to the area in which we have particular and relevant expertise: those issues relating to residential tenancies and in particular, the operation of residential tenancy databases in Australia. The most common perception of databases is that they are a “black list” and there is a significant lack of transparency. Even if databases do provide avenues by which tenants can access and correct their personal information, our workers indicate that tenants are quite unaware of how to use them or even that they exist at all.