Julie Collins (Franklin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Agriculture) Share this | Hansard source

The Agriculture Legislation Amendment (Streamlining Administration) Bill 2019, as we heard from the minister, does seek to amend Australia's biosecurity laws in relation to imported food and imported goods to provide for streamlined administration through automated, computerised decision-making. The current bill is intended to amend the Biosecurity Act 2015 and the Imported Food Control Act 1992. The explanatory memorandum states that the bill will allow risk identification and management across a large number of goods and conveyances. It will also reduce the burden on importers by enabling fast, accurate clearance and providing flexibility in responding to existing and emerging risks. It also states in the EM that it's intended that the principles set out in the Administrative Review Council will be taken into account during implementation of the automated decision-making scheme, 'to the extent consistent with maintaining biosecurity and food health and safety standards'.

The proposed bill provides discretion for authorised officers under the respective bills to override an electronic decision where satisfied that the electronic decision is inconsistent with the objects of the relevant act or where another decision is more appropriate in the circumstances. It goes on to say that decisions made by a computer program will be subject to merits and judicial review in the same way as a decision made by an officer under the relevant provision. In the case of the Biosecurity Act, a decision will be taken to have been made by the director of biosecurity but not in a personal capacity, and, as such, the decision will still be subject to an internal initial review in that first instance.

This is all very important because we know what has happened with this government, particularly in relation to automated computer systems, in the past. They don't exactly have a great record when it comes to this. All you need to do is talk about things like the ABS. Who remembers the census of 2016, when everything crashed? What a debacle, it really was. The census website crashed and then the blame game started, but, instead of us accepting responsibility, the government blamed everybody else—as usual. The ATO website, as we know, crashes several times every year, usually around 1 or 2 July, when it gets high traffic coinciding with the end-of-financial-year activities. This continues to happen. We've seen the myGov website crash several times. We saw it crash spectacularly during the beginning of COVID, the pandemic, with distressed people trying to get access to critical government services at that time. At the time, I and many members on this side, I'm sure, received many contacts from people desperately trying to get into government services and get access to the system. We had the responsible minister apologise for claiming hackers had targeted the website. Later we of course found out that it wasn't hackers, and his response was just, 'My bad.' That's the response that you give when you don't have anything else to say, when you know that you were just making up excuses.

We also have seen many older Australians who had sadly passed away receive letters from the My Aged Care government website and system. We know that people are getting letters for deceased relatives more than a year after their relatives have deceased, and this continues to go on. Then there is the tech debacle to end all tech debacles, the robodebt disaster, where we saw innocent Australians believe they had occurred a Centrelink debt when indeed they had not, all because they were sent incorrect information by a computer—

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