Ms Catherine King (Ballarat, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Health) Share this | Hansard source

I want to be very clear about what has actually just happened here. Labor do support the establishment of a National Cancer Screening Register—we have said that from the start—but, only a scant few weeks after the government introduced its legislation, the government has had to move 12 amendments to its own legislation because we have pointed out, through the Senate, as we should do, holes in this legislation. That is what this parliament is designed to do.

When we referred these bills to a Senate inquiry, what did this minister say? It was that, 'Labor is being hysterical. There is a hysterical tirade from Labor about these bills.' What we have just seen is the minister having to come to the dispatch box and say, 'I did get it wrong. We rushed this legislation. We have not thought about this properly, and I have now had to move amendments to my own legislation.' Perhaps it would be better, Minister Ley, if you actually talked to us in the first place before you introduced legislation. We can tell you what our issues are going to be. We are going to have debates about you deciding that something should be contracted in this way, because, frankly, it is not the best process when we have to amend and force the government to actually come to this dispatch box and amend its own legislation in this way. The Department of Health might have briefed us about what they were planning to do, but it is not until you get into the detail that you get an opportunity to say, 'There are some problems here.' That is what the Senate inquiry did.

We will support these amendments. We do not want to hold up this legislation. We know that this is a problem of the government's own making. They took the decision to sign a contract with Telstra in the dying days of the last government. They took that decision. Why? We do not know. We suspect it was something to do with an election announcement that they backed away from. This government took that decision. They have now had to retrospectively introduce legislation to allow that to happen. It is a disgrace, frankly, that they signed a contract before this parliament had passed legislation to establish the register of which the contract was the subject.

We are seeing a complete shambles when it comes to introducing health law in this country, an inability to actually get the legislation right in the first place, leaving it to the last minute—this is something that came, from memory, out of the 2015 budget; it was in not the 2016 budget that they wanted to establish an National Cancer Screen Register—and then having to amend their own legislation on the floor of the chamber.

We are happy, through this process, that we have improved these bills, apart from the two areas that I mentioned in our amendments. We do believe very firmly that there should be mandatory data breach reporting not just to the Privacy Commissioner but to the individuals affected, particularly when you look at the information that is there. Imagine if that information got into the public domain and you as in individual did not know about it. Imagine if that happened. Recently, with the data breach, there were 16 to 17 days from notification of the breach to the Department of Health—individuals still do not know if their data has been breached or not—before the minister reported it to the general practice sector. It is simply not good enough. We also absolutely contend that the penalties are still not good enough. As I said, we will support these amendments, but we will seek to continue to prosecute our case in the other place.

I particularly want to reiterate the issue that this is really a very large debate about what the role of the for-profit sector is in the delivery of government services. It is a very big debate and a very big decision that this government has made, for the first time, to give a for-profit provider a national cancer screening register. As far as I am aware, this is the first time a for-profit telecommunications company has had control of such a register. It is a big call that the government has made. We will be looking, with great interest, at the capacity of Telstra to actually deliver on its contractual promise on the delivery date it has promised. We are hearing already that there are some major problems around that. That has nothing to do with the passage of legislation; it has to do with the capacity of the organisation. This is something that we will continue to prosecute because this government, at every single opportunity, has given preference to the private sector when it comes to Medicare. It has wanted to privatise Medicare, and this is just an example of what is to come.

Question agreed to.

Bill, as amended, agreed to.

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