The section itself is relatively quiet on the intended protections and we've understood from the minister's comments in previous testimony that it's intended primarily to protect vulnerable individuals, and that's obviously a step that we wholeheartedly support.
We have heard from other witnesses that they see the section as superfluous and in fact, the current regime prospectively provides sufficient protection for vulnerable individuals. We're not experts in the operation of that but what we would say is this. We have no difficulty with the underlying premise of this. Where we would benefit, frankly, is from specification of the groups intended to be protected under this. I had named a few, but I'm sure that it is a non-exhaustive list. We would hope to see a regulatory power in there that would in fact specify those groups—again, in a non-exhaustive fashion.
I think for retailers the challenge that requires guidance, frankly, is this. There are a lot of scenarios here. Judging whether somebody is a minor will depend upon whether it's a face-to-face situation or an online transaction. In one case, you're presumably relying on whatever parental controls exist over smart devices and otherwise. If an individual in most cases indicates that they're over the age of whatever, you don't know with certainty whether you're getting what is really valid consent. In an in-store situation, it's easy enough to tell whether it's an eight-year-old but it may not be quite so easy to determine whether it's a person of the age of majority or if indeed that's the appropriate test in all circumstances. You're getting into a lot of subjectivity on issues of whether somebody has linguistic fluency, so a lot of what we're looking for in this is more specific guidance. We do find this provision general. We hope that there will be further development from it.