Mr. Brian Fee:

We did put out a press release at the time. Six weeks were given for the consultation process, so it was not too long a time that people would forget about the deadline and yet it was short enough that people had time to make a submission. We would have referred to it quite a bit in replies to parliamentary questions and so forth to get it out there. We had it on the Department’s website with a dedicated e-mail address. We made it as easy as we could for people to get submissions into us.

There were a fairly limited number of responses from individual consumers. That might have been down a little bit to embarrassment. People might not want to attend a public consultation process, talking about their personal circumstances. We did have responses from consumer representative organisations. We captured the flavour of peoples’ concerns.