Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for the Digital Economy) Share this | Hansard source

In an era where we marvel at what technology enables us to do, we often think of the good things it achieves, but we also need to be mindful that technology can be used against people in very harmful ways. There will always be people—it is always the case that there are bad apples—who want to do terrible things. It's the responsibility of governments to frame up laws and approaches and empower responsible agencies to deal with this. In the debate around encryption last year there was a recognition that we need to allow security agencies to have a degree of power to tackle those bad actors that want to harm people, but, in doing so, we need to frame and use laws that will not actually, through overreach, undermine the very things that we rely upon.

Encryption, as much as it has been framed in national security terms, is also about economic security, because it is a platform that allows businesses to build a commodity that is not necessarily tracked on a daily basis but means a lot to people in the real world. It's the commodity that I would refer to as trust. Knowing that data can be provided between players in an environment where you trust that data is crucial. Yet the laws that this government put forward on encryption have been truly badly framed, ignoring the advice of so many people and trashing the reputation of those in the know. Those people have cautioned about the way in which the government has botched encryption laws and effectively trashed Australia's tech industry reputation globally. It is a sight to behold.

I was very glad to see this week a number of people whom I have high regard for within Australia's tech sector speak so openly, led by Scott Farquhar from Atlassian and people like WiseTech's Richard White and 99designs's Patrick Llewellyn. All these people are saying this will have a terrible impact on Australia's tech industry because it's making people in other parts of the world doubt whether they can rely upon Australian tech. It is terrible. This law has to be changed. We need to make sure we have proper judicial oversight in there. We need to make sure that elements of this bill, where it allows individual employees to be approached and compelled to assist, and not tell people what they're doing and mess with a sensitive encryption system that undermines the basis of trust, are looked at. The recommendations of the parliamentary oversight committee that have been completely ignored by this government need to be dealt with. These laws must change. We have to get the balance right between national security and economic security.

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