Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Innovation, Technology and the Future of Work) Share this | Hansard source

I'm very grateful to the member for McMahon for his contribution. He led a great process within our party to try and think through some of the ways that we could push to get the best bill out of the parliament on this crucial issue. I think we've done a really good job of that. We've worked across the two sides of parliament to make sure of it. We have done something here that is quite unusual, and that is to genuinely improve a bill and get a really good outcome for Australians. I firmly believe that the app that's been designed could—I use that word very deliberately—be a critical part of the way that Australia can start to recover from the COVID-19 economic and health crisis. The legislation that's before us, the Privacy Amendment (Public Health Contact Information) Bill 2020, puts into law some aspects of the legal structure that will essentially sit around the app. Part of the controversy today are the things that are in the bill, but I think there is a lot more controversy about the things that are not in the bill: the way the app has been rolled out and the way the government has described what it was going to do. I think it hasn't been set up for success in the way that those of us on this side of the chamber would have liked to have seen. I'll talk about some of those issues, but I think, like most of us, my perspective on all the policies that we're discussing as a parliament at the moment is very much informed by how I've experienced this crisis—that is, from the extensive contact that I've had with the people that I represent and how their lives in many instances have fallen apart over a series of weeks and days. The family that always comes into mind when I am thinking about the different policies being put forward and how they will affect Australians is one that lives in Oakleigh South in my electorate. The parents and a daughter, who is 19, live together. All three members of the family lost their job in three days. The impact of that on the welfare of that family, not today, not next month but probably in six and 12 months time, is just enormous. Those are the people that I have in my mind when I think about issues like the bill before us.

One of the real concerns I have about the way this debate is being conducted by the government is about a lot of the rhetoric that's surrounding how far we are through this crisis. We get told that the curve has been flattened. We get told that we are past the peak. The Prime Minister and the Treasurer have talked about this notion of 'snap back'. That really worries me because I think it completely underplays the size of the task that's ahead of us. We are six weeks into this thing. We are not going to be out of it until we either have a cure for the coronavirus or we eradicate the coronavirus in Australia, which looks very much like it's not going to happen. There has never been a cure for a coronavirus in history, yet our entire political discussion is predicated on the notion that this thing is past the worse of it. I respect some of the good work that has been done on the other side, but I think we are in for a very difficult year and what the government is having to guide us through is virtually—I'm not going to say it is impossible, because it must be made possible, but what we are talking about here is opening up an economy, letting people go back to work in the middle of a global pandemic that might last for another 18 months or perhaps longer.

The challenge that we are going to face over the coming weeks, as states start to take away the restrictions of movement and on work, is something that no other country in the world has been able to manage yet. Almost all of the countries in the world that we were looking to as best-practice examples perhaps two or three weeks ago have had to put new restrictions down. Even in China, where they did everything possible—and I mean everything possible—to rid Wuhan of this virus, they are again in lockdown there. We see in Singapore and South Korea, which were the great examples to show us that we could manage an economy and get people back to work in the middle of a pandemic, are having to reintroduce restrictions. So, the size of this task is absolutely massive.

Of course, health is the main priority here; I absolutely accept that. We've seen brilliant examples of leadership coming from Victoria. The leadership shown by our Premier has been exemplary, and the public trust in the way that he is managing the process has been so important in helping us get through to this stage. But I also think about that family in my electorate that have lost their jobs. My constituents need to go back to work. They need to go back to work because they need to get food on their table and they need to get their lives back and rolling, and they are very worried.

We know all the things that we need to do. We know the structures that we need to set up in this parliament. We need extensive testing. We need isolation of cases. We need a way for workplaces to be made COVID-safe. We need Australians to follow the rules and regulations about social distancing, and handwashing and hygiene, and we need tracing. We need a fast way to track where Australians are going only so that we can help them and so that we can stop this pandemic from spreading further through our country.

I am absolutely desperate for the government to succeed on this, and it is quite rare for me to be able to stand up and genuinely say that about a bill that is before us. The concern I have is that every indication that I see in the press conferences about the app, the way this conversation has just wildly swung as we've got to the point we are at today, makes me very nervous about whether this process has been set up for success. I've downloaded the app. It's open on my phone right now. I get pinged by notifications several times a day, as I'm sure many of you do too. I want it to work, but I think some of the history here is ringing alarm bells for me. I'm supportive of this legislation because the truth is that most—not none—of the concerns I have about this bill are not about the legislative structure that we've set up. I think the law before us is a good law. I think one of the takeaways from the conversation about this bill is that we can have a good conversation about a technology issue in this country. That's much better than some of the ones we've had with the government in recent years.

We're supportive of the concept of this bill. We're supportive of the concept of a contact-tracing app. We've raised some concerns where they've been warranted. The bill we have before us isn't perfect, but I do want to acknowledge that the government have been good about the way they've engaged with some of the issues that Labor have raised. I went into this discussion absolutely believing that we would need to have an extensive set of amendments moved by Labor and discussed by those on the other side, and probably a whole lot of divisions. We're not having that today. Labor's not moving amendments, and there's a really good reason for that. Almost everything that we raised with the government as areas of major concern were actually dealt with by the government and fixed in the bill that's before us.

I just want to mention some of the specific things that Labor raised and fought for, and that we were able to work through with the government during that process. One of the things that was a very significant concern for people who have a human rights and privacy perspective was the issue about how people would be protected when they were asked to download the app, or essentially coerced into downloading the app. One of the instances that people were concerned about, for example, was that they wouldn't be allowed to go back to work and that bosses would say, 'You're not to come back until you've downloaded the app.' People were worried about not being able to enter certain premises because the owner of the property might say, 'We're only allowing people in who have downloaded the app.' One of the things that's very important about this, to maintain public trust, is that the app is voluntary. So we were able to make a change to how the government proposed the voluntary nature of the app so that it was genuinely enforced, and that was by giving a much stronger role to the Privacy Commissioner in how she'll be able to manage situations where people feel they've been coerced.

We have required six-monthly reporting, on behalf of the health minister and the Privacy Commissioner, on the app. Again, it's critically important that we watch this process. This is new for Australians. We want people to genuinely believe that technology can be used for the public good, and to do that it's important that we continue to monitor how the situation is progressing.

We secured additional oversight and certification responsibilities to ensure that the Commonwealth complies with its obligation to delete COVIDSafe data when the app is no longer in use. One of the really important things we were promised and that we were able to enshrine in this law was that at the end of this pandemic all that data that has been collected by the app would be deleted. No record will be kept of what was recorded by the app of the various people you were in touch with.

There are a number of other changes and improvements that have been made to the bill, but it's crucially important for people who are listening to understand that the reason Labor are not moving amendments is that we did a lot of work before we got to the chamber. We consulted with technology stakeholders, we consulted with people who have a focus on digital rights and we made sure that the things they were worried about actually got dealt with in the bill—I acknowledge the government's willingness to work with us on that—and that's why we have a bipartisan commitment to pass this bill today.

I said that the real concern here is actually not what's in the legislation but the broader way technology issues are handled by this government and the unfortunate place that this COVID app debate takes in that context. The moment this idea was released, the moment the concept of an app was discussed, people's hackles were immediately up. There was an immediate sense of suspicion about what the app would do, how it would collect data and how you'd be able to control what information was kept by it. I think it's really important for us to step back and see why that suspicion was there. It was there because the government, time after time after time, had shown that it actually couldn't bring about a big technology change in a way that was consultative, that respected people's rights and that allowed everyone to have a say, or to say how it was going to be for the public good rather than some sort of coercive purpose.

We don't have to look far into the past to find examples. Everywhere we turn, every time the coalition have tried to do something that relates to technology, they have totally stuffed it up, so why would we trust them with our data? I think that's how a lot of people felt when they were going into this. I'm even thinking about things like the national broadband network. Labor had this great proposal for fibre-to-the-home for 90 per cent of Australians, but under this government we ended up with this mishmash of mixed models. It was a totally missed opportunity to do something to futureproof our country and our economy.

There was the absolutely kneejerk and ham-fisted approach taken on the encryption legislation prior to the last election. I don't think there is a single moment in this parliament's recent history where we have trashed the trust that people have in us to deal with technology issues more than what happened there. It was a truly appalling instance of Australian public policy. And the fact is we're trying to crawl back from these incidents. That's the issue.

One of the other awful examples is also one of the first things the government did with this incredible capability of artificial intelligence that can help us solve so many public policy problems—that is, robo-debt. In an appalling, error-filled way they went around and persecuted some of the most vulnerable people in the country. It's just so regrettable that these are the issues that the government chooses to apply technology solutions to when there are actual public policy problems that are more important, that are more crucial to use artificial intelligence for. But how are we going to get the trust of the Australian people for the next important issue when we just trash their trust in its use through something like robo-debt?

We even saw it in more flippant examples. We had the minister responsible come out and pretend—let's not say pretend, but infer—the myGov website had been hacked when there was no basis for that. Of course it turned out to not be true. Why do these things? We've got to be a lot more careful and thoughtful about how we integrate technology into public policy, because we can do so much better, and we need to do so much better.

That has extended right through to the way we saw the government handle the introduction of the COVID app. We had the government announce the app before they knew what it was going to do—why would they do that?—so instantly everyone was on the back foot because no-one was able to give a clear answer about anything. We had the Prime Minister say that it was going to be mandatory, and then days later he had to unwind that. The government started this whole public discussion about the merits of the app, trying to get people on board, without explaining how it was going to work and how people's privacy would be protected. And they still haven't shown Australians the source code in an open-source format so that these technology specialists out there who are so concerned about some of the ways that technology is being used in public policy can have their concerns allayed. It's just an absolute mess.

What we're seeing here today is that we're trying to come to the party—we want people to trust government in doing this—but government is doing everything it can to lay boulders in its own path to making this technology app work. We know this is crucial, because for the app to work it has to have mass take-up. We had the shadow health minister talk about the need for somewhere in the order of 40 to 60 per cent of Australians to download the app. There are medical specialists who say it must be much higher for us to get use out of this app. What we are talking about here is how, if we are ever going to get to that point, we need everything to go right all the way along. We don't need the Prime Minister to come out and say he's putting forward an app and it's going to be mandatory and he isn't able to exactly explain what it's going to do. This could have been handled a lot better, but let's try to use this as a starting point to refresh this conversation. We've got a bill before the House. I think the app is very important. Labor will be doing what it can to try to make this work.

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