Tim Wilson (Goldstein, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Where do I begin? I'm probably about to make myself very unpopular in this chamber, but sometimes you've got to stand up, speak the truth and do what is right, and the simple reality is that I have not had any enthusiasm, ever, for the My Health Record system. It's a bad policy introduced by the Labor Party when they were last in government. Had I been elected to parliament at the time, I would have stood up, spoken against it and said: 'I don't think it's right. I don't like the idea of a centralised system recording people's health records—least of all when the law doesn't even put limitations or protections in the legislation around who can access it, so busybody bureaucrats, tax officials and people merely seeking information can access it.'

This is Labor's legacy to health: establishing My Health Record. And why? To solve, frankly, what I consider to be a nonproblem. These schemes are around the world. If you go and look at other countries everywhere, you'll see the My Health Record system or its equivalent. And you know what comes out? They're models proposed by technocrats and high-priced consultants in response to questionable problems in health record keeping. Funnily enough, they all seem to make a lot of money out of it, and over time they become lumbered with more and more information and obligations until basically they get to a point where nobody uses them anymore. In the end they become a massive waste of money, and they aren't used in the way that they were designed or for the purpose of solving the problem which they were trying to solve. That's the basis and the legacy of Labor's My Health Record system, and that's why I spoke out and said I opted out. I don't make any apology for that. You hear the hypocritical arguments being put forward by the member for Ballarat, amongst others. They get up and lecture the current government about My Health Record and how we haven't done enough, but we are fixing their problems. They're the ones who introduced the system that didn't put the security and safeguards in place. I welcome what the government is doing to fix up Labor's mess. Labor are responsible for the problems and the practises that sit at the heart of this law.

I've also said publicly that it's my belief that it should remain an opt-out system. That has not changed, and that will not change. I think that's called the tenets of liberalism, and, as I've said, that's one of the reasons why I opted out. But, if we're going to have such a system designed by the Australian Labor Party and legislated two parliaments ago, we should at least have these types of security mechanisms sitting at the heart of it. And what do we have? The Australian Digital Health Agency will have obligations put on it about how information is to be disclosed and to make sure that there are appropriate penalties should information be disclosed in an inappropriate way. The My Health Records Amendment (Strengthening Privacy) Bill 2018 will require the system operator to delete the health information it holds for any consumer who has ever cancelled their My Health Record. To support these amendments, we have an extension of the opt-out period. Very good. Congratulations to the minister for doing so, because your health records—the health records of the Australian people—should be private. They should be a matter for you and your doctor, not tax accountants, bureaucrats or police officers trying to find information without any just cause and without a warrant. This bill is so welcome, because it fixes the legacy that we inherited. So I say to the Minister for Health: congratulations for doing the right thing in fixing Labor's flawed My Health Record system.

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