Secondary use of government-held personal data: public interest, law, ethics and good practice

Project details

Australia and New Zealand are both seeking to maximise the re-use of people’s personal data, held by governments, in research. Examples from Australia (My Health Record and the Commonwealth Data Availability and Transparency Bill) and New Zealand (the Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI)) yield ethico-legal questions around consent, privacy, public interest and personal expectations of data control and re-use.

This project, involving collaboration between the University of Melbourne and the University of Auckland, examined these issues through a hybrid workshop in June 2022.  The workshop focussed on the themes of transparency and trust; group data harms and Indigenous data sovereignty.  The project successfully fostered research collaboration across the Tasman on how to govern personal data, held by government-entities, to best serve the public good.  The report of this workshop is available here.