Well, here we are on the cusp of December 2021, meaning it’s almost 2022. What a year! A huge thank you goes to all our members and stakeholders for supporting our work this year. In case you missed our AGM this month, we launched our new website, the technical team have strengthened our intercapital connectivity, completed numerous upgrades, and started rolling out the new out of band network. Our admin team have been amazingly efficient making sure all of our member data is perfect while we get ready to migrate to our new portal, and our advocacy work has hit amazing highs contributing to the debate on regulation. On top of all that, we also successfully ran the AGM under our new constitution as a company limited by guarantee. What an amazing effort by the team! They’re even madly trying to get some end of year events for you to attend, but as we now hit the Omicron letter of the Greek alphabet, our events list will sadly have to remain short. Hopefully some of you will get to a cruise or pub night out with fellow IAA members. Perhaps some of you might even get to our new office in North Sydney that we are visiting again regularly!
Of course, as we move into the silly season, the various pieces of legislation the government hadn’t had passed are creeping out – just this last week we’ve seen yet another attempt to legislate trolls out of existence, and earlier this month we saw ACMA introduce a parallel customer identification system (on top of the new Comms Alliance Code) and the cut down Critical Infrastructure bill was passed, meaning we will all have new mandatory reporting in the new year. Treasury have also decided they want to be our next big regulator, and will be requiring us to meet Consumer Data Right obligations, and to apply it to everything that attaches to a ‘carriage service’ – you guessed it, that means anything that goes on and with a network service, from phones to IoT widgets. It all keeps us on our toes advocating for reasonable, lighter touch regulation that enables good service, not heavy-handed obligations that merely add to dataveillance and make business harder.
We also ran a roundtable at NetThing on the topic of Internet as an Essential Service last month – while many people see this as indisputable, regulating it as such has a whole different meaning and would require a long list of obligations on service providers that might not necessarily get what users need. Have a watch of the session on our website. We had some great contributors to the discussion with perspectives from all over.
Next year also looks like it will be exciting for us as well. Hopefully all the new pieces of kit we’re ordering will arrive in a timely fashion, so we can activate capacity well in advance of it being needed. Once again, we’re all just wishing for the pandemic to go away so that supply chains can get back to some sort of normal.
Finally, I have to say that I have a new boss – Matthew Enger has stepped up as the new Chair of the Association, with Brett O’Hara acting as Deputy Chair. I have no doubt Matt will be excellent, and he has been just brilliant in providing his time as a Director, past Secretary and Deputy Chair. David Hooton, outgoing Chair, will certainly be very much missed, and I am very glad to see him stay on the board. David has contributed so much with his industry and technology know how, and has been a fantastic guide for me and the team. He has been tireless in his time and effort for the Association, and we are immensely grateful. THANK YOU DAVID! Thanks also to Field Solutions for your support.
Hope to see you all soon, and do have a safe holiday season!
Narelle Clark, IAA CEO
