Ms Elizabeth Farries:

The Minister states there should be no exception and that there should be equal treatment for everybody in the legislation. In order to adhere to EU law, the equal treatment would need to be raised to a level that includes those prescribed protections, which means for this legislation there could be no authorisation of data access at the level of the District Court, it would always need to be a High Court judge. In addition, the emergency situation exceptions, where a journalist can go straight to the agencies without a judicial intervention at all would have to be eliminated also. To raise the level up to acknowledge journalistic special privileges would require very stringent legislation.