• Educate government, business and the community about personal information rights and responsibilities
• Influence government and business to adopt best practice management of personal information
• Deliver best practice privacy complaint handling
• Use regulatory powers to uphold and promote privacy compliance.
• Contribute to further reforms of privacy laws

The 2014–15 financial year was the first full year of operation of the privacy law reforms made by the Privacy Amendment (Enhancing Privacy Protection) Act 2012.

During 2013–14, our advice and guidance focused on preparing organisations and agencies for the commencement of the privacy reforms. Throughout 2014–15, our focus turned to promoting privacy as a tool to enhance customer trust and confidence. We emphasised the need for organisations and agencies to build privacy into their business-as-usual processes.

To enable this, we developed a range of guidance documents to assist entities, including the Privacy management framework, a tool to help organisations and agencies ensure compliance with the new Australian Privacy Principles and embed a culture of privacy into their everyday processes. We also developed policy documents that explain how we would exercise our expanded regulatory powers.

The 2014–15 year was also a busy year for privacy advice. During the period we published 32 pieces of guidance material, conducted seven public consultations, provided 197 pieces of external policy advice, made 36 submissions on legislative or other formal policy development processes and made six legislative instruments.

We also continued to conduct work in the eHealth space, as the independent regulator of privacy aspects of the Personally Controlled Electronic Health Records (PCEHR) system and the Healthcare Identifiers (HI) service.

From a compliance perspective we continued to undertake a wide range of activities to ensure that privacy is valued and respected in Australia. These included providing a free information service, investigating and resolving individual complaints, conducting assessments, data-matching inspections and Commissioner initiated investigations (CIIs), and receiving and administering a voluntary data breach notification (DBN) scheme and eHealth mandatory DBN scheme.

• Educate government and the community about rights to access government information
• Influence government agencies to adopt best practice in upholding information access rights
• Foster proactive publication of public sector information, including through the Information Publication Scheme and disclosure logs
• Deliver best practice FOI merit review and complaint handling
• Monitor and investigate FOI administration to drive improved agency performance
• Contribute to further reform of access to information laws

During the 2014-15 reporting period, we undertook a range of activities in accordance with our statutory responsibilities under the Freedom of Information Act 1982. These included conducting Information Commissioner reviews and handling freedom of information complaints, monitoring compliance with the FOI Act by agencies and ministers, and providing policy advice and guidance.

During the period, we finalised 482 applications for IC review, 64 FOI complaints, 4,384 extension of time requests and notifications, and responded to 1900 enquiries.

We also significantly reduced the backlog of IC reviews and complaints that existed at the start of the reporting year. This was achieved by implementing a streamlined IC review process focused on early resolution. At the beginning of 2014–15, the oldest un-actioned IC review application was 206 days old. By the end of the year, the oldest matter was 40 days old.

• Strive for excellence in people management
• Nurture a culture of integration across the OAIC’s functions, branches and sites
• Maintain robust governance frameworks
• Ensure the OAIC’s information asset management framework is effective

Due to the Australian Government’s decision to disband the office, the majority of our people management and organisational excellence goals were not achieved.

Instead, we spent the year focused on supporting and providing assistance to staff throughout the closure. This included providing support, training and assistance to staff members who required relocation after our Canberra office was closed.

• Contribute to Australia’s national and international engagement on open government
• Promote and monitor the use of the principles on open public sector information
• Contribute to the creation and adoption of an open data policy in Australian government

Due to the Australian Government’s decision to disband the office, the majority of our information policy goals were not achieved.