Read a Submission

The Review Committee agreed to the public release of submissions on this web site. This was done to ensure that the review process was open and that meetings and deliberations of the committee were well informed.

The Review received over 3000 submissions, including over 300 supplementary submissions.

A Summary of Issues is available for viewing, which gives an indication of the number and types of issues raised in the first 2,738 submissions received.

Over 80% of submissions were treated as confidential and do not appear on this website.

Whilst the Committee's guidelines did indicate that submissions would be made public unless confidentiality was sought, it is evident that many submissions were sent without authors being completely aware of the submission guidelines or understanding the possibility of their submissions being made public.

The information contained in these submissions and others was often very personal information, such as service history, financial circumstances, state of health and family details. In order to protect the privacy of the authors and others mentioned, the Committee agreed that any submissions containing this type of personal detail should be treated as confidential and as such was not included on the website without the express permission of the author.

The Committee acknowledges that some people would have provided their submissions containing personal information with the expectation that it would be made public in accordance with the guidelines. However, the Committee could not be sure that the author was aware of the guidelines, unless the individual made a clear statement that they did or did not seek confidentiality, and hence took the approach of respecting people's right to privacy as a precaution against unauthorised release.

The action in making these submissions confidential should not be misconstrued as censorship or an attempt by the Review Committee to withhold information from others interested in the Review, its processes or likely outcomes. It was simply to ensure that personal information was not made available in a highly public way without the agreement and knowledge of the author.

All submissions reproduced on this website have been treated as public submissions and the authors have been notified of the status of their submissions. There are some instances, however, where submissions containing personal information have been included on the website with the author’s permission.

The views expressed in the submissions on this site are those of the author and it should not be thought that they represent the views of the Commonwealth, the Review Committee or Review Secretariat, or indicate a commitment to a particular course of action.

The Review Committee trusts that readers will respect the right of individuals and organisations to present differing views and opinions. The Committee would be extremely disappointed if any infringement of this basic right were to arise.

The reproduction quality of submissions is variable and the electronic copy provided is the best available for the size and format produced for downloading. Not all material provided to the Review Committee has been original or high quality and in some cases legibility of the documentation has been poor. If completely illegible, some attachments to submissions have not been included.

The submissions linked from this page are available as Adobe Acrobat PDF documents for download. Please use this link if you require information about downloading, viewing and printing Adobe Acrobat PDF files. The following links are to Adobe Accessibility tools and to the Adobe Web-based form to convert PDF files to text.

Submissions are presented in two ways, in alphabetical order of the author's surname and/or in alphabetical order of the organisation name.

Some submissions contain many pages and may take longer to download.

Nineteen batches of public submissions have been included between 19 April and 13 September.

To view a submission please select the letter corresponding to the surname of the author of the submissions:

A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z

To access available submissions sorted by Organisation, click here on the
List of Submissions.