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Automated Decision Making Transparency Obligation (APP 1)—Issues Paper

Submission Date: 3 July 2026

The Law Council of Australia provided a submission to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) to comment on the development of guidance on the automated decision making (ADM) transparency obligation.

Apart from input from the expert bodies acknowledged above, this submission draws on previous relevant Law Council submissions, including particularly our 2025 submission to the Attorney-General’s Department’s Use of ADM by Government: Consultation Paper,1 the Law Council's submission to the Senate inquiry into the Privacy and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2024,2 and the Law Council's 2022 submission to the Digital Technology Taskforce’s Positioning Australia as a Leader in Digital Economy Regulation—ADM and AI Regulation Issues Paper.3

The Law Council’s advocacy has consistently identified core priorities and principles when it comes to ADM by public sector agencies in particular. The findings and recommendations of the Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme also highlighted the deeply concerning consequences of what happens when key protections are otherwise absent from ADM. Those recommendations are highly relevant to inquiries such as the present one. The Law Council's 2025 submission to the Attorney-General’s Department recommended that:

  1. the Australian Government commission an audit of all current or proposed use of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation to make or assist in making administrative decisions by or on behalf of Government agencies;
  2. legislative amendments be made to ensure that, where it is intended that a statutory power be exercised by using ADM or AI, the statute expressly authorises the use of ADM or AI; and
  3. all legislation that authorises the use of ADM and AI to exercise, or assist in the exercise of, statutory powers should:
    • be consistent with regard to the types of powers that may be exercised by ADM or AI, and employ standard statutory language for expressing the power to use ADM or AI;
    • require an assessment be undertaken of the suitability of the proposed automated system to exercise the statutory power, as a precondition to making arrangements for use of AI or ADM;
    • require that all arrangements for the use of ADM be subject to ongoing governance requirements by a multidisciplinary team to ensure they remain lawful and up to date, including auditing, testing and reporting obligations;
    • require that officials publish all arrangements for the use of ADM and any suitability assessment which underpins it, including sufficient information to enable a broad understanding of how AI or ADM operates to produce lawful administrative decisions; require that any affected individual must be notified where there is significant use of automation, including AI, in making an administrative decision;
    • require that an automated decision must be capable of being reduced to a statement of reasons explicable by a human, produced by a full audit trail of the decision-making path, for the purpose of enabling it to be reviewed by a tribunal or court, and the person affected by the decision should have a right to request such reasons; and
    • provide for the automated decision to be subject to review, preferably review by a human internal to the agency, and the person affected by the decision must be informed of that review avenue.

As stated in the Issues Paper, under the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth), from 10 December 2026, the types of ADM that require disclosure in Australian Privacy Principles (APP) entities’ privacy policies will be those that meet the following criteria:

  1. the entity has arranged for a computer program to make, or do a thing that is substantially and directly related to making a decision; and
  2. the decision could reasonably be expected to significantly affect the rights or interests of an individual; and
  3. personal information about the individual is used in the operation of the computer program to make the decision or do the thing that is substantially and directly related to making the decision.

This reflects new APP 1.7. The Law Council generally supported the introduction of this new APP in our submission on the Privacy and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2024. The Law Council has consistently emphasised the need for public and private entities to build public trust and confidence in automated decision-making processes, by ensuring that these processes are transparent, and that clear criteria exist about the factors considered, especially where the personal information of individuals is used.4

The Issues Paper explains the meaning of “computer program” and “substantially and directly related”, and discusses what “significantly affect the rights or interests” of an individual means in the context of this new transparency obligation. This will be important in determining the scope of the transparency obligation, and the Law Council provides its views on these terms below.

As there is considerable latitude in potential interpretation of these aspects of APP 1.7, the guidance produced by the OAIC will be crucial in determining its effectiveness to protect individuals’ rights and interests in practice. Ultimately however, the privacy regime is limited in how it can regulate ADM. A binding framework based on these principles outlined in our 2025 submission to the Attorney-General’s Department is required.

1 Law Council of Australia, Use of ADM by Government: Consultation Paper (Submission, 24 January 2025).
2 Law Council, Privacy and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2024 (Submission to Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee, 22 October 2024).
3 Law Council, Positioning Australia as a Leader in Digital Economy Regulation – ADM and AI Regulation (Submission, 6 June 2022).
4 Law Council, Privacy and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2024 (Submission to Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee, 22 October 2024), [81]-[82].

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Last Updated on 03/07/2026

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