A bill has been considered to strengthen the information sharing privacy between Australian companies and BPO industries in their offshore outsourcing companies. The “Keeping Jobs from Going Offshore (Protection of Personal Information) Bill 2009”, spearheaded by Senator Steve Fielding was discussed last July 2010 with industry representatives to starts its approval and legalization to Australian legislative division.
The bill focuses on two main important points: one, a transfer consent or agreement must be drafted for company information to be handled by offshore outsourcing companies. And the other major point is to have strict identification of foreign calls being made by outsourced companies offshore to telemarketing recipients. Although the bill is not entirely anti-offshore outsourcing, it can create compliance issues with big investors and can discourage the almost free trade of offshore outsourcing service industry.
The president of the Australian Business Process Outsourcing Association, Martin Conboy, disagrees with the bill stating that only a small percentage of service of jobs of about 2-4% of the services jobs can actually be given to offshore outsourced companies. The small percentage is no match for the country’s economic strength. The Australian economy relies its strength to its own resources averaging to about 19 billion AUD annually compared with the BPO services garnering only about 2 billion AUD each year. Small business companies benefit largely in outsourcing their services offshore because they can revert their savings into the growth of their local enterprises. Also, offshore services enable the production of cheaper products and services that can make the prices more affordable to most of the Australian market consumers.
Conboy further states that the Australian government must concentrate in the quality of the local Australian service industry as more and more services will be given to offshore BPO companies particularly in the Philippines and India which offer the best services support in the Asian region. He predicts that as the years come, the service industry can have the possibility of being supplied by the cheaper labor and higher quality offshore outsourcing companies of these two competitive nations.
