On 18th September 2026, Precision Group lodged a formal submission with the Attorney-General’s Department on the exposure draft of the Privacy Amendment (Personal Data Protection) Bill 2026. The Bill’s new consent requirement for trading personal information would remove the main way Australian charities recruit new donors by post. And the cost would fall not on charities, but on the people their services support. We support giving Australians a stronger say over how their data is used; our concern is with a single provision and its unintended reach. Our CEO, Cory Hall, sets out the problem and our recommendations in full below.
SUBMISSION
Exposure Draft Privacy Amendment (Personal Data Protection) Bill 2026
The consent requirement for trading personal information (APP 4.2 and s 6FC) – consequences for charitable fundraising
To: Attorney-General’s Department, Privacy Reform (PrivacyReform@ag.gov.au)
From: Precision Group, Somerton, VIC
Date: 16 September 2026
About Precision Group
Precision Group is an independent, family-owned Australian communications and production business, established in 2008 and based in Melbourne. Through our Group offering we provide fundraising strategy, creative, data analytics and digital services to charities across Australia and New Zealand.
Thanks to our unique offering we also print, personalise, enclose and lodge direct mail we create – so we see the acquisition pipeline from the first strategy conversation right through to the pack arriving in a letterbox. We also offer these same production services for hundreds of charitable organisations who provide finished artwork and rely on our expertise to ensure their cause is heard, needs listened to and ultimately inspire enough people to help support them, so they can continue the essential work for those who rely on their tireless efforts simply to help others.
We welcome the Government’s commitment to updating the Privacy Act and to giving Australians a stronger say in how their information is used. However, this submission deals with a single provision which, as currently drafted, would close off one of the most important sources of new supporters avenues for Australian charities. The greatest cost of that would not be absorbed by the charity sector: it would fall on the people who rely on the services fundraising revenue supports, and ultimately on Government, because the need for those services does not go away when the funding does.
The issue
Under new APP 4.2, an organisation must not trade in personal information unless the individual has consented. Section 6FC treats a disclosure as a trade where it is made for money or other consideration, or for the purposes of direct marketing. Combined with the heightened consent standard in s 6AAB – consent that is voluntary, informed, current, specific and unambiguous – the provision reaches every source of third-party data charities use to recruit donors by post: cold list rentals, reciprocal list swaps and co-operative databases.
The exceptions in s 6FC(2) and (3) offer no relief. None of them covers a commercial list owner supplying names to a charity, and none covers one charity exchanging supporter data with another.
Item 13 of Schedule 2 compounds the problem by applying the new rules to information already held at commencement. Data gathered lawfully over many years, under today’s opt-out framework, would be rendered unusable overnight.
Why this matters
For charities that depend on cash appeals, direct mail remains the one acquisition channel that is both proven and scalable. Digital channels recruit fewer donors, at greater cost, and those donors are less likely to stay. Digital also struggles to reach older Australians – the group responsible for the bulk of charitable giving (The Benchmarking Project, 2024*).
A first gift by mail is the start of a relationship, and much of its value arrives years later.
Donors recruited this way regularly progress to monthly giving, larger gifts and, in time, a gift in their Will. Sector benchmarking indicates that roughly 30 per cent of major donors, and around 80 per cent of known gifts in Wills, can be traced back to a cash appeal program (The Benchmarking Project, 2024*). Nationally, gifts in Wills are estimated to be worth $1.3 billion a year to Australian charities – close to a tenth of all giving (JBWere, The Bequest Report 2025**).
Impact on charities and the fundraising supply chain
Data from Tedirex*** shows that about 90 per cent of Australian charity direct mail acquisition volume comes from third-party sources – commercial lists, co-operative databases and charity swaps – every one of which would need consent under the Bill. The remaining 10 per cent is drawn from lapsed donors already held on a charity’s own file. That is a finite and shrinking pool, and it cannot carry an acquisition program on its own.
Because we run acquisition campaigns end to end, we can speak plainly about the economics. Creative, data processing, print, personalisation and postage costs are spread across the whole mailing, and acquisition only pays its way when campaigns go out in the tens of thousands. Restrict a charity to the small number of people who have given specific consent for their details to be shared and volumes fall away, the cost of every pack climbs, and the investment no longer stacks up for a board or finance committee.
In our view the realistic outcome is not a scaled-back program – it is the end of mail acquisition altogether. Cash appeal programs would then erode year on year as existing supporters lapse and are not replaced. Mail cash appeals account for around 12 per cent of annual philanthropy to Australian charities.
The heaviest losses would land five to fifteen years from now, when the bequests of donors who ought to be recruited today simply never arrive. For hospital foundations, medical research institutes and community service organisations, gifts in Wills are frequently the largest source of untied income, and JBWere estimates their return on investment at around six times the average across all fundraising activity. Untied income of this kind is what lets a charity fund the parts of its work no government contract prices in – and its loss would be felt by the patients, families and communities on the other end of that work, not by a balance sheet.
The consequences would not stop at charities. Direct mail acquisition sustains skilled Australian jobs in data services, printing, mailing and logistics – including in our own Melbourne facility – and a sudden collapse in acquisition volumes would be felt right along that supply chain.
Who ultimately bears the cost
This is not only a problem for the charity sector. Fundraising revenue does not merely sustain organisations – it funds services that Australians in hospitals, aged care, disability support, homelessness and family violence services, and rural and regional communities rely on every day. The Department of Social Services’ own Not-for-Profit Sector Development Blueprint records that government funding already accounts for 51.2 per cent of charity income nationally – equivalent to around 16 per cent of all government spending (Department of Social Services, Not-for-Profit Sector Development Blueprint, 2024*****). Donated and bequeathed income – much of it originated through the direct mail acquisition this Bill would restrict – is what allows charities to do more than that government funding alone could buy: the extra bed, the outreach visit to a town too small for a funded program, the counselling session that falls outside a contract’s guidelines, the emergency payment for a family that doesn’t meet a means test.
When that income contracts, the need it was meeting does not contract with it. Services are either cut back – waiting lists lengthen, outreach shrinks to the cities, crisis lines reduce their hours – or Government is asked to fund the shortfall directly. Neither is free, and the sector has little room to absorb a shock of this kind: in the most recent ACNC reporting year, charity expenses grew faster than revenue (8.6 per cent versus 7.5 per cent), and total donations and bequests fell from the year before (Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission, 2024 annual charities data******). A policy that further narrows new donor recruitment, layered on top of that, would be felt first by the people the services are for, and only later – as a bigger bill – by Government.
Why the s 6AAB consent standard cannot work for acquisition
We support consent as a principle. Our concern is that the standard in s 6AAB cannot, in practice, be met for acquisition data. Nobody can give specific, informed and unambiguous consent to their details being passed to a charity they have not yet encountered, for an appeal that has not yet been written.
A pre-selected option on a form will not suffice either – the consultation paper itself notes that “seeking consent through preselected settings or pre-ticked boxes would likely not be sufficient”. And an unticked box will mostly stay unticked – not because supporters object, but because few people bother with optional fields.
Donors are already well protected. APP 7 gives every individual a simple way to opt out of direct marketing, charities overwhelmingly honour those requests, and the Fundraising Institute of Australasia (FIA) mystery shops its members to test compliance. The existing APP 7.3 also expressly allows an organisation to use personal information sourced from a third party for direct marketing where obtaining consent is impracticable, provided an opt-out is offered.
The Bill removes that provision and substitutes a consent requirement at the point of disclosure – with no apparent assessment of what this means for charitable fundraising. The result is a mismatch. A charity may still write to someone under an opt-out model, subject to the general fair and reasonable test, yet the disclosure that puts that person’s name in front of the charity is barred without consent. The logic does not hold together.
The United Kingdom, having been through comparable reform, still permits postal marketing on the legitimate interests basis, backed by an absolute right to object, and reserves consent for electronic marketing (Information Commissioner’s Office, direct marketing guidance).
Our recommendations
- Charitable fundraising exception. Amend the definition of trade in s 6FC to exclude a disclosure of personal information to a registered charity (within the meaning of the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission Act 2012), or to a service provider acting on its behalf, for fundraising purposes – whether the disclosing party is a charity or a commercial organisation. We would support a tightly bounded exception: the recipient is a registered charity; the purpose is fundraising; the channel is postal mail; the individual can opt out at any time; and the individual is told the source of their information on request.
- Transition period (in the alternative). Should an exception not be adopted, defer the application of APP 4.2 to disclosures made to registered charities for fundraising for no less than three years, and use that period to develop an OAIC code for charitable fundraising in partnership with the sector.
- Clarity on APP 7.7 and APP 4.2. APP 7.7(b) and (c) carve communications governed by the Do Not Call Register Act 2006 and the Spam Act 2003 out of the direct marketing principle, yet neither APP 4.2 nor s 6FC contains a matching carve-out. On the current drafting, sharing phone numbers or email addresses for fundraising would require APP 4.2 consent even though the calls and messages that follow are already regulated by those Acts. The Bill should state clearly how the two provisions operate together – and whatever treatment is given to electronic channels should extend to postal mail, the least intrusive channel and the only one without a regulatory regime of its own.
- Small charities. Confirm that the revised small business exemption in s 6D will not bring small charities within the Act solely because they rent a list or take part in a list swap or co-operative database.
Closing
We accept that commercial list rental is one of the practices this reform sets out to regulate. But where the recipient is a registered charity, the communication arrives by post and the individual can opt out whenever they choose, the harm the Bill is aimed at does not arise – while the damage to the sector would be serious and lasting.
The provision also sits uneasily with the Government’s wider agenda. On 18 December 2024 the Government restated its goal of doubling philanthropic giving by 2030 and announced further measures in support of it (Australian Taxation Office, Philanthropy: support to double philanthropic giving by 2030****). Removing the sector’s main means of finding new donors – and with it the future flow of major gifts and bequests – would set that goal back, as a side effect of a measure designed with other practices in mind.
It is equally at odds with the Productivity Commission’s direction. In Meeting the productivity challenge (December 2025), the Commission urged the Government to find $10 billion in regulatory savings, called for “efficient and low-cost data access policies and outcomes-based privacy legislation”, and backed an “outcomes-focused Privacy Act more fit for the digital age” that would “reduce the burden on individuals and better protect their privacy, while giving business greater ability to innovate”. As its third reform principle puts it, “poorly designed or implemented regulation is a handbrake on growth”.
A blanket consent requirement on every disclosure for direct marketing – regardless of channel, recipient or actual risk, and layered over the Bill’s own fair and reasonable test – is precisely the kind of prescriptive, overlapping rule the Commission cautions against. It would add fresh compliance costs to a sector the Government wants to see grow. It would also create a cost the Commission’s framing does not currently capture – not a compliance cost paid by business, but a service cost eventually paid by Government, once the people who lose access to charity-funded support turn, as they will, to the public systems already stretched to meet them.
For a major charity or a regional community service, a rented list is often the only realistic way to reach people who share its concern. Precision Group would be glad to provide de-identified campaign and production data, and to take part in any sector roundtable convened on this matter.
Yours sincerely,
Cory Hall
CEO, Precision Group
Sources
* The Benchmarking Project, 2024 – https://fundraisingworld.com/learning-from-benchmarking-fundraising-trends-success-factors-for-nonprofits-in-australia-new-zealand/
** JBWere, The Bequest Report 2025 – https://www.jbwere.com.au/campaigns/bequest-report
*** Tedirex – https://tedirex.com/
**** Australian Taxation Office, Philanthropy: support to double philanthropic giving by 2030 – https://www.ato.gov.au/about-ato/new-legislation/in-detail/not-for-profit/philanthropy-support-to-double-philanthropic-giving-by-2030
Productivity Commission, Meeting the productivity challenge, December 2025
Information Commissioner’s Office (UK), direct marketing guidance
***** Department of Social Services, Not-for-Profit Sector Development Blueprint (2024) – https://www.dss.gov.au/system/files/documents/2024-11/d24-1528640-not-profit-sector-development-blueprint-web-accessible.pdf
****** Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission, Australian Charities Report, 12th edition (2024 annual data) – https://www.acnc.gov.au/tools/reports/australian-charities-report-12th-edition
The consultation on the exposure draft is open, and submissions from across the fundraising sector will carry weight. If your organisation depends on recruiting donors by mail (or on the gifts in Wills that so often begin with a single appeal) this reform is worth your attention. Precision Group has offered the Attorney-General’s Department de-identified campaign data and a seat at any sector roundtable convened on the issue. To talk through what the reforms could mean for your fundraising, or to see how we help charities across Australia and New Zealand, get in touch.
Photo by Clark Tibbs on Unsplash
