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Comment by alexis_fr | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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).

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