James Shaw, director, government relations: "What we know is it would cost several million dollars just to scope out the cost of preparing the data sets for the agencies under a data retention proposal."

Shaw: "...agencies themselves will face significant costs in that they will have costs of accessing that data and then manipulating and investigating it in a way that makes it usable for them and also their own destruction costs at the end of the process."

Shaw: "In terms of putting a firm proposal -- and that would involve looking at the costs as well as the technology side -- we think that it would take at least a year, and then the implementation of the scheme would be rolled out over the years from that point in time when there was a decision about what the final form would be."

Darren Kane, director, corporate security and investigations: "The issue with this is that it is such a moving feast that there could not be agreement from the departments around the datasets. Each time a dataset was agreed upon [in Attorney-General's Department talks], the complexity and the evolution of the network meant that that was expanded upon or contracted. The issue over many years has been exactly what datasets the departments and the agencies require from the industry."