Hacker News Reader

Comment by stone-monkey | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, this is basically the software developer's dilemma in reverse. You're building out systems for areas of business with no domain expertise. End users constantly wonder why the developers built the software in such profoundly stupid ways.

Lawmakers face the same problem in that they're barraged with constant problems from completely different fields that they're unlikely to be subject matter experts in. How do they learn about it? By consulting subject matter experts. Who are these subject matter experts? Well established businesses in their field. This can lead to laws that are incentivized towards large businesses. That's just considering a situation where everyone is working in good faith.

Now consider lawmakers having to cater towards what is currently trending with the populace, kickbacks from companies, pull from different governments/organizations/political parties etc. And it's easy to see why politics is the way it is.

View on HN

> By consulting subject matter experts.

Experts were consulted, and ignored. A lot of experts came right out and said these laws were insane. The Australian tech industry were not in favour, and the consulted experts were not favourable.

However, the experts that were listened to were the ones who worked for ASIO, who said that these laws were absolutely necessary just for the agency to continue operating, and it was urgent that they were deployed in the last few days of Parliament. So the laws got rushed.

> Experts were consulted, and ignored.

This led to my point, though I made it in a roundabout way. None of these laws are made in a vacuum. When you get a law that seems to cause undue harm to industries or to general consumers, it's unlikely the case that lawmakers wrote up something due to negligence of the issues, but because another entity specifically pushed to have these laws written in this way.

If I had two experts, one of whom was security and one of whom was business, and they disagreed with each other, I would also be listening to the security expert first.

After all, there have been major catastrophic failures because some IT tech followed the orders of a CEO to give them access to a mission-critical system from their insecure home PC. Isn’t that essentially what the whole “but her emails!” (and, it turned out later, his emails) was all about?

Expert shouldn’t be counted in number of votes for/against... If you have FastMail and Atlassian, biggest and most successful startup of Australia who relocated to UK, telling you off with the CEO taking a public stance that the government is crippling progress, then it’s not hard to listen: Your economy will lose big.

It shouldn't work like this either. If two major chemical companies threatened with relocation and their CEOs told the government it is crippling progress unless it seriously relaxes environmental protection laws you wouldn't want the government to just back down.

At best you have some independent experts with no stake in the game, but even then politics will often result in a compromise that is suboptimal for all involved.

You're right. You'd want the government to approach with extreme caution when you have two largely conflicting opinions emerging. You'd want amendments to try and balance need and impact.

Unfortunately, this was rushed through in a matter of days, and in fact the Parliament doors were locked to force an immediate decision, trying to make people throw caution to the wind.

I’m not counting votes either. I’m saying that for all the flaws in how this law was made, the one thing that wasn’t wrong was putting national security over business interests.

(Probably didn’t actually help national security, but that’s a separate problem).

I would expect anybody worth their salt to consult experts from said field they with to bridge into. Otherwise, why the hell are you blindly passing out laws? Sheer incompetence.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com