Gary Hardgrave (Moreton, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Australian Labor Party have yet again put a proposition to Australia that if they were elected they would have a ministry for victims. The heart of the member for Sydney really was not in her contribution to this debate tonight, but she went through the philosophical nightmare that she has to face because of the extreme left of politics that is her favourite ground. She put the case: ‘No matter what benefits you think are possible, don’t worry, you will be a victim—you will be made to feel a victim. Everything will fail; everything you have will be lost.’ We are going to see and hear a lot more of this from the Labor Party between now and the federal election day—an alternate government that believes in growing the numbers of victims in Australian society. A constituency of victims suits the Labor Party. To create an environment whereby people are downtrodden and feeling as though they are somehow or other consigned to some sort of threatening environment suits the Australian Labor Party. It is not the way Australia operates in 2007, and they need to get over this philosophical hurdle that continues to encumber them and continues to cause them to fail to do the hard work to understand what is before the House right now.

What is before the House tonight is a bill that starts the incremental steps towards the creation of this access card regime. This is not about a national identity card. That was 20 years ago—and 20 years ago the member for Sydney probably led student protests in favour of the Australia Card. She can exercise as many ironies as she likes, and she can besmirch the professional standards of public servants in this country under parliamentary privilege for as many days as she likes, but the simple reality is that what this government is doing is putting in place a system that will suit the law abiders, the people of Australia who do the right thing by the system. As the ad says, it supports the system which supports them. In my electorate of Moreton, if we want to talk about Medicare and Medicare services and benefits, there were 1.6 million services in the 2004-05 financial year, according to the complete set of ratified figures that I have, some $67.3 million worth of services; in the electorate of Sydney there were 1.9 million services, some $86 million worth of services. So I do not know whether the member for Sydney is somehow putting a case in favour of this higher use of Medicare. If the AFP’s figures are right, 50 per cent of fraud against the Commonwealth is committed in Medicare transactions, so maybe she is putting a case to make sure we do not put pressure on those in her constituency who are a party to that. Either way I think her contribution tonight has missed the point completely.

Nor is this about following the British model. I have to say that a few of my colleagues have had a few comments to make about what has happened through the Home Office. When I went to the Home Office four years ago as a minister in this government and spoke to them about a variety of things, one of the things I clearly understood was that the UK circumstance is very different from Australia. For a start, they have far more porous borders. There are a lot more illegal entrants in the UK than in Australia—in fact, I think the estimate at that time was about one million people in that country. They did not know who they were. So the British government—and particularly in this post-September 11 environment it is not an excuse for draconian measures but an excuse to look at and refine further good conduct to society—brought in, basically, a system which said, ‘No card, no access,’ to flush out all those who were unlawfully in society. That is not an issue in Australia today, because we have a very different and in fact much-envied system of organised migration to this country.

The Human Services (Enhanced Service Delivery) Bill 2007 is the first of a series of bills, a point the member for Sydney did not highlight to the House. This is about establishing the framework of what is to come next, and it could not be done in a more open and accountable way than with this series of staged legislative responses to the variety of issues which the member for Sydney has raised. Frankly, in the absence of an understanding that this is the first of a series of bills, it might have been a legitimate series of things she raised, but she forgot that key point: this is not the endgame; this is the beginning of it. This is about establishing a framework for the card. This is about addressing matters of community interest, including establishing the objects and the purposes within this legislation to prevent things such as function creep—and I will deal with some function creep ideas that have come out of my constituency by way of example; there are a variety of them and I will come back to them in a moment. But this is also about establishing the register and the card to provide certainty so that information will be on the register and the chip within the access card. It is about prohibiting unauthorised demand for and use of the access card for identity purposes, and it is about vesting the ownership of the access card with the cardholder.

The Minister for Human Services, Senator Ian Campbell, and his predecessor Minister Hockey made it absolutely plain that a variety of subsequent legislation will be brought into this place. Before the people of Australia, we will see a full and open debate—before the first registration of the access card, which is due by April 2008. A variety of matters are expected to be dealt with, including the protection of the information on the register and the card. Legislation will be put before this place that will set out completely the limited circumstances of access, use and disclosure of information, including its relationship with the Criminal Code covering such things as hacking offences. It will deal with matters such as the effective oversight and governance of the access card system; issues regarding use of the access card—in other words dependants, carers and other linked persons and their access to the information on the card—circumstances giving rise to the suspension and cancellation of registration of the card; and the replacement of lost and stolen cards. It will also deal with some of the issues relating to the individual’s area on the chip, where they can store some voluntary information that may be of use to them in their interaction with government. It will be about presenting the card to obtain Commonwealth benefits from 2010 and other transitional issues.

Listening to the member for Sydney tonight, the people of Australia would be confused and think they are about to have what the Hawke government tried to introduce in 1987—that is, a one-size-fits-all compulsory stamp across their forehead in the form of a plastic card. That is not what this government is proposing. We want to deal with the convenience of access to government services, and we want to deal with the opportunity for people to put additional information on the card to make that journey with government a lot easier. We want to make it possible for those who are dealing fraudulently with the Commonwealth to be put under pressure. The minority of people in this country who do the wrong thing should be penalised and should be reasonably under threat of restriction. We are not trying to control the population or to restrict legitimate access to the support afforded to those in need.

In my electorate there are 4,519 people who are non-income support healthcare cardholders; 8,520 people who are healthcare cardholders; 15,071 pension concession cardholders; and 2,248 Commonwealth seniors healthcare cardholders. That is 30,358 people who are no doubt very interested in whether or not the variety of combined access to Commonwealth services could in fact be better facilitated by the use of this one card which would provide them with easy access to those services. I do not know the exact figures on veterans, but I have a very strong local veterans community in my electorate. There are about 200,000 veterans in Australia; 135,850 of them have gold cards, 47,000 have white cards and 15½ thousand have orange cards. There are 109,487 dependants who also have gold cards. So there are a lot of Australians who can get what the member for Sydney either was too lazy to raise or quite deliberately forgot to raise in her presentation to the Australian people tonight.

What the government is out to do with this legislation is to put in place an improved access regime that ramps up the protection for the taxpayer and ramps up the integrity measures associated with interaction with government. A lot of government departments like to have their own systems—that is, what suits them and the way they operate. It is a bit like the oft talked about Yes, Minister series in that nothing is going to happen until the system is in place. So, in a lot of ways, this is a bold set of steps for the bureaucracy to get their heads around as well. They have to work very hard in a cooperative way to make sure that they are seeing things from a whole-of-government point of view, not simply from the view of what suits their own department’s logic. It is not fair or right to suggest, as the member for Sydney did tonight, that public servants are somehow or other in the trade of information game. That was the impression she tried to give.

Our constituents are very interested in this—there is no doubt about it—and perhaps for the sorts of hysterical reasons outlined by the shadow minister for victims, the member for Sydney. People can see that there are some possibilities associated with this card. Mr John McGregor, from my electorate, wrote me a letter saying that he sees all sorts of possibilities. I do not think it hurts, as a contrast point in this discussion, to put some of these things down. For instance, he says that in the debate we are going to have in Australia he would like to see a high-memory capacity discussed. He would like to see his access card able to store a wide variety of digital media, from standard text files and doc files to audio MP3 files. I see the member for Macarthur is at the table. He would possibly like a few MP3 files on his card too, but I do not want to put words in his mouth.

Mr McGregor is making the point that it is not so much about listening to your favourite song as being able to format image files such as X-rays, which could be of some use in the sorts of emergencies that people have talked about. The government is not planning these things, but the point is that these technical possibilities are there. As we move forward, we have to be careful that we get the balance right, as the government is trying to do in this incremental advance towards the access card.

Mr McGregor also said it would be nice to hold secure and non-secure information on the card. That could be quite handy in your contact with state and local governments. His point is that perhaps his library card could be displaced by this smartcard. He would have a ready reckoner on file of the sorts of books he liked, not just simply a secure Medicare file. All of these things would be opened by a personal identification number and perhaps some other biometrics, such as digital fingerprints, iris scans and so forth. Either way, he would like to have control of his card. That is not an unreasonable expectation.

Whether or not the government want to move down that path will be discussed in the weeks and months ahead, as we work our way through incrementally. It is not the intention of the government to go down that path, but the possibilities, technically, are there. Offering secure ID functions on the card could, my constituent says, allow people to opt to use this as a way of dealing with authority in helping to check people’s identity. There are all of the Big Brother overtones associated with that. Perhaps 20 years ago, in the ID card debate associated with the Australia Card, we were right to say no. But the possibilities are still there in a technical sense and we may see an incremental move towards that.

Perhaps police officers will be furnished with a portable smartcard reader. The member for Sydney says you can get them from Dick Smith pretty cheaply. They would have to be cheap for the Queensland police to buy them. Nevertheless, there are real possibilities to access particular data that is authorised to be accessed. There could be some sort of open folder format, just like opening a passport. That is Mr McGregor’s viewpoint. His idea is to be able to use the technology associated with this card not just for the official, secure transactions with government but perhaps as a passive means to carry out transactions for things within the community.

We will have an interesting debate as we work our way through this issue. It is a debate that the government are rightly sponsoring through the responsible way that we are working our way through this legislation. There is the opportunity to bring in further legislation to harness the protocols that Mr McGregor and others aspire to. At the same time we will make sure that we are not ignoring those sorts of possibilities out of some great hysteria because we are worried that data will not be protected and we will all be stamped with ‘the mark of the beast’, as Revelation puts it.

I remember 20 years ago working in the media—I think this time 20 years ago I was working for The 7.30 Report on the ABC—and there were plenty of people in the community who were fostering all of the conspiracy theories that the member for Sydney tried to put in her contribution tonight. Those sorts of approaches are quite real in the minds of the sheltered few, but the simple reality is that in Australia and the world in 2007 there is a demand for us to be more accessible to a range of services using digital formats. Equally, our digital identifiers are well established and well known: if you are on the internet, you have an internet provider associated with your particular website; and as you access the internet your information is gathered and stored. There are reasons to be fearful about how secure some of those sites are—and lots of money is spent by governments in particular to secure certain sites, as indeed they should. I think the lessons of the last 20 years are based on the practical reality of the way a lot of information has been accessed by those who we do not want to access it, and it means that we are a lot better at protecting information than we have ever been in the past. People like Mr McGregor are saying that we should look at opt-in and opt-out options within this access card regime. On the identity theft front, we should demand of government that it has the protocols in place to make sure that any transaction, voluntary or otherwise, that we happen to transact by use of this card is afforded the greatest level of protection that is technically and scientifically possible.

The simple reality in the job that you, Mr Deputy Speaker, and I do is that we know from the information we gather—because people offer it to us in our dealings with our constituents; and we know because of the insights we are afforded through committee work in this place of the way in which police protocols and information-gathering protocols are supported in this nation—that there is a lot of information out there about each and every one of us. The question then is: do you want to combine all that in a convenient way? If you are an honest law-abiding citizen there is nothing to fear in the slightest.

At the end of it, this legislation is about supporting the law-abiding decent Australian citizen—and there are millions of them—who transacts almost on a daily basis with government departments and ensuring that those transactions are easy and properly coordinated processes. It is about ensuring that those people are also well protected against those who misuse those processes and cause, by government estimates, billions of dollars of funds to be siphoned away to where they should not go.

Where the technology and the possibilities of this take us is in the hands of this parliament, and that is why the government is embarking on a set of very careful steps down this path for a 2010 start and for the registration process to start in April 2008. We are starting the process in this debate, and I commend this bill to the House.

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