John Murphy (Lowe, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

He is a great Australian, Simon Crean—no doubt about it. I have been privileged to be his parliamentary secretary. He is a good friend of mine and he is having a great birthday here in the national capital.

Returning to the bill, the same can be said about privacy protection. Australians need detail. While the Howard government has had the law firm Clayton Utz prepare a privacy impact statement, the government refuses to release it. The privacy impact statement is itself being made private by the government. The government is not making a strong case for the Australian people to trust it when it refuses to trust them with this information. It is still not entirely clear what the government is trying to achieve by introducing the access card. As my colleagues have suggested, the lack of information available suggests that the access card is a solution in search of a problem and not the other way around.

Given the enormity of the scope of this scheme, the government must start from the assumption that individual rights are superior to the rights of the state. If the government seeks to erode individual rights, it must surely be forced to discharge an onus of proof that there is an overwhelming public benefit in private rights being eroded. It has failed to discharge that onus of proof. It has failed to give a full explanation as to why the relationship between the state and the citizen should be dramatically changed in this fashion. The compelling reason that the government says necessitates this access card is protection against fraud—in particular, welfare fraud. There is a healthy scepticism in asking whether welfare and Medicare fraud is as rife as the government suggests. In an article titled ‘Knowing me, knowing you’, published—

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