Peter Dutton (Dickson, Liberal Party, Minister for Immigration and Border Protection) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That this bill be now read a second time.

The Identity-matching Services Bill 2018 implements the Intergovernmental Agreement on Identity Matching Services, which was agreed between the Prime Minister and the first ministers of all states and territories at the Special Meeting of the Council of Australian Governments on Counter-Terrorism of 5 October 2017.

Under this intergovernmental agreement, the Commonwealth and all states and territories agreed to preserve or introduce legislation to support the sharing of facial images and related identity information via a set of identity-matching services, for a range of national security, law enforcement, community safety and related purposes, while maintaining robust privacy safeguards.

The identity-matching services enabled by this bill will help to strengthen the integrity and security of Australia's identity infrastructure—the identity management systems of government agencies that issue the documents most commonly used by Australians to provide evidence of their identity, such as driver licences and passports.

These systems play an important role in preventing identity crime, which is one of the most common and costly crimes in our country.

By preventing identity crime, the identity-matching services enabled by this bill will help to protect the identities of everyday Australians from theft and misuse, and help those who have fallen victim to identity theft to more easily restore their compromised identities.

Identity theft is an issue that is of significant concern to many Australians—and with good reason. Around one in 20 Australians every year are the victims of identity crime, with an estimated annual cost of $2.2 billion.

In addition to financial losses, the consequences experienced by victims of identity crime can include mental health impacts, wrongful arrest, and significant emotional distress when attempting to restore a compromised identity.

Identity crime is also a key enabler of serious and organised crime, including terrorism.

Australians previously convicted of terrorism related offences are known to have used fake identities to purchase items such as ammunition, chemicals that can be used to manufacture explosives, and mobile phones to communicate anonymously to evade detection.

Identity crime is aided by the growing sophistication of criminal syndicates and the technology now able to support them in manufacturing fake identity documents.

Organised criminal groups are now producing false driver licence and other documents in bulk, often using similar technology to that available to the government issuing agency itself.

An operation by the joint Australian Federal Police and New South Wales Police Identity Security Strike Team found that the fraudulent identities seized from just one criminal syndicate were linked to:

These documents often have genuine biographic details, but a fraudulent photograph, and can therefore be difficult to detect. This is a particular problem for driver licences, which are the most commonly used photo identification documents in Australia and therefore are the most sought after by criminals.

For many years government agencies have been able to verify biographic information on driver licences and other identity documents such as passports by using the Document Verification Service (DVS).

However, name-based checking tools such as the DVS cannot detect documents that contain legitimate biographic details but with a substituted photo, nor can they identify an unknown person from a facial image.

The identity-matching services enabled by this bill will greatly assist our law enforcement and national security agencies by providing authorised agencies with the means to rapidly share and match facial images drawn from existing databases in order to identify unknown persons, and detect people using multiple fraudulent identities.

This will help our agencies to more quickly identify persons involved in a range of serious criminal activities, importantly, to bring them to justice.

Beyond the national security and law enforcement benefits, these identity-matching services can make government and private sector services more secure, accessible and convenient to citizens.

This supports the government's Digital Transformation Agenda and offers significant cost savings and greater identity assurance for private sector entities seeking to comply with anti-money-laundering and counterterrorism-financing regulations.

The identity-matching services will also help to mitigate the impact of the 'black economy' and make it more difficult to use fraudulent identities to avoid legitimate taxation and other financial obligations.

The identity-matching services will also benefit victims of natural disasters who are seeking access to support, including those who have lost their identity documents.

By checking the person's photo against a passport or driver licence image, government agencies will be able to assist individuals to verify their identity in order to receive disaster relief payments, and assist them in replacing their lost or damaged government documents.

The identity-matching services will also make it harder for persons to obtain driver licences in false identities in an attempt to avoid traffic fines, demerit points or licence cancellations. This will improve road safety by increasing the detection and prosecution of these offences and deterring dangerous driving activity.

The bill will help deliver these benefits by providing explicit legal authority for the Department of Home Affairs to collect, use and disclose identification information in order to operate the technical systems that will facilitate the identity-matching services envisaged by the intergovernmental agreement.

The bill will authorise the Department of Home Affairs to operate a central interoperability hub, which is one of the technical systems that supports the identity-matching services.

This hub is not a database and does not conduct any facial biometric matching. Rather it acts like a router, transmitting matching requests received from user agencies to facial image databases. These databases conduct the matching using facial recognition software and return a response back via the hub.

The hub does not store any personal information, but retains certain data about transactions for auditing and oversight purposes.

This approach enables the matching of images between agencies that operate different facial recognition systems that otherwise may not be compatible.

The passport, visa and citizenship images that are used in the identity-matching services will continue to be held separately in databases by the Department of Home Affairs and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade as the agencies that issue these documents.

Driver licence images will be made available via a National Driver Licence Facial Recognition Solution. This system will be hosted by the Department of Home Affairs on behalf of the states and territories in accordance with the intergovernmental agreement.

The system will consist of a database of driver licence images and information supplied by each state and territory, and a facial recognition system for biometric comparison of facial images against facial images in the database.

The design of the driver licence database will enable each state and territory authority to control access to its data via the identity-matching services, and it will not provide the Department of Home Affairs with the ability to view, modify or update identification information supplied by state and territory authorities.

The bill will authorise the Department of Home Affairs to collect, use and disclose identity information for the purposes of developing, operating and maintaining the identity matching services. The bill will define the scope of these services in terms of:

Rather than enabling the use of any type of personal information, the bill defines, and therefore limits, the identification information that may be used in the services. In doing so, the bill excludes certain types of personal information from being used in the services, such as information about a person's political opinions or religious beliefs. This is to ensure that the department may collect, use and disclose only those types of information that are reasonably necessary in order to provide the identity-matching services.

The identity-matching services to be enabled by the bill will reflect those in the intergovernmental agreement.

These include a Face Verification Service that will help to verify a person's identity. In addition to preventing identity crime, this service will make it easier for people to prove their identity when they are applying for government services.

Use of the Face Verification Service will commence with government agencies, but the bill also enables the service to be provided to private sector organisations—for example, banks or telecommunications providers—that have regulatory customer identification requirements.

It is important to note that private sector organisations may use the Face Verification Service only with the consent of the person whose information is being verified.

The bill also provides for a Face Identification Service, which law enforcement and national security agencies will be able to use to identify unknown persons or detect persons using multiple fraudulent identities.

Recognising the increased privacy impacts of this service, its use will be constrained only to those agencies with national security, law enforcement or anti-corruption functions that are specifically listed in this bill.

The bill also provides for other identity-matching services that are designed for use by state and territory driver licensing authorities, to help improve the integrity of their data and licence-issuing processes.

In authorising the Department of Home Affairs to collect, use and disclose identification information for the purpose of providing the identity-matching services, the bill limits the department's provision of these services to certain defined 'identity or community protection activities'. These activities include:

Importantly, the bill does not provide any additional legislative authority for other agencies or organisations to collect personal information in order to use the services. These organisations will need to have a separate legal basis to support their use of the identity-matching services.

The bill provides a rule-making power to enable the Minister for Home Affairs to expand the types of identification information that may be used in the identity-matching services or to add new services in future. To ensure that the privacy and other human rights implications of these rules are taken into account, the bill requires these rules to be developed in consultation with the Information Commissioner and the Human Rights Commissioner. As legislative instruments, these rules will also be subject to parliamentary review.

To provide robust protections over the information used in the identity-matching services, the bill will provide for new criminal offences with penalties of two years imprisonment for unauthorised recording or disclosure of certain protected information. This includes identification used in the identity-matching services, as well as other information that relates to the security of the systems supporting the services.

These offences will apply to employees or other persons working on behalf of the Department of Home Affairs, defined as 'entrusted persons'. These offences will be in addition to existing offences for the misuse of personal information contained in a range of legislation which will continue to apply to the department and to the other agencies that use the identity-matching services.

The bill will also provide robust accountability and transparency measures to help maintain public confidence in the operation of the identity-matching services. These include annual reporting to parliament on the extent of use of the services by government agencies and private sector organisations, and a statutory review to be commenced within five years.

In conclusion, this bill will give effect to the commitments made by the Commonwealth in entering into the Intergovernmental Agreement on Identity Matching Services.

The identity-matching services enabled by the bill will help to reduce the impact of identity crime on the community, helping Australians to prove their identities more securely and easily.

They will also promote a range of law enforcement, national security and community safety outcomes, while providing robust privacy protections over the use of personal information.

Debate adjourned.

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