The importance of maintaining a private right of action has been raised by civil society stakeholders throughout the consultations that have taken place since 2018. It's also been raised as an important feature by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner.
Because of the way the law is set up, although it's possible for the commissioner to recommend an administrative monetary penalty, that's not going to compensate an individual who may have suffered a transgression of the act on their own personal information. It wouldn't do anything to make them whole. What a private right of action does, as it's proposed in the bill, is allow the individual in that finding, on the basis of a decision and a finding of the Privacy Commissioner, to go and seek awards or compensation on the basis of the impacts they faced through the transgression of the law.