Henry Pike (Bowman, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today in support of this excellent and timely motion moved by my good friend the member for Casey. We find ourselves in a rapidly deteriorating cybersecurity environment for which we are ill prepared. In many respects, we lag behind other nations. This is an environment made more hazardous by escalating global tensions and increasingly sophisticated criminal enterprises, which expose Australians, Australian businesses and Australian institutions to rampant identity theft, online scams, blackmail and fraud, as we've seen over recent months. No-one is immune to the consequences of these crimes, which in some cases have been shown to be state sponsored and which continue to grow at an exponential rate.

Over recent years, Australians have been the target of ruthless cybercriminals and fraudsters. Once they're inside our networks and firewalls—which in some cases may not be overly difficult, as we've unfortunately discovered—there is a rich seam of wealth, information and identity to mine, and mine it they do. In the past financial year alone, some $1.2 billion in online transactions took place between Australians and Commonwealth agencies. But this is just the tip of the iceberg when you compare it to the many billions of dollars in private-sector transactions which take place over the course of the year across the whole of this country and which, in many cases, are even further exposed. In just the last few weeks, we've seen cyberattacks which resulted in the theft of massive amounts of personal data from Optus and Medibank. Of course, I wouldn't be alone in saying that many of my constituents have been affected by these issues and have raised these issues with me, as I'm sure they have with all the other members in the chamber here.

The Optus and Medibank breaches have highlighted a compelling need for a national digital identity system. The digital identity system initiated by the coalition government in 2015 is a safe, secure and convenient way for Australians to prove who they are online each time they access government services. What a fantastic improvement in online government services we saw over the course of the nine years of the previous coalition government. The system is entirely voluntary and is controlled by the individual. The coalition's digital identity system today provides safe, secure and convenient access to government services online for more than six million Australians via the myGovID provider platform. I'm sure many members here have just filled out their tax returns and had their assessments back and know how easy it is to utilise that system.

In late 2021, the coalition, after significant consultation, circulated an exposure draft to extend the number of digital identity system providers beyond the 80-odd services offered by the Commonwealth. Extending the digital identity system to state, territory and private-sector services is now a national and personal data security issue of the highest order. The extension was to include various state and territory agencies and private-sector businesses, allowing them to verify a person's identity and remove the need to collect and hold vast swathes of personal information themselves.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not suggesting that if the coalition had been returned the identity system would be up and running, and not to such an extent that the personal data that we've seen exposed by the recent Optus and Medibank matters would not have been compromised. But what I am saying quite clearly is that we would be in a far stronger position on this issue under a coalition government. Aside from firing off the odd dissenting criticism in the 2020 Senate committee report, Labor have largely been silent on the issue of digital identity. Labor failed to announce any position on a digital identity system either before the election or after the election. Labor's dereliction of duty on this issue is starkly evident in their recent budget, which failed to reference so much as a single new initiative to boost the performance or security of digital services that many Australians rely on. Labor's budget provides plenty more public servants but fails to fund the necessary digital capability that secure and reliable government services in this third decade of the 21st century will require.

The minister has finally acknowledged the urgency of the problem and has pulled state and territory digital ministers together for a blatantly beefed-up digital identity system, effectively picking up where the coalition left off before the election. I strongly encourage the Albanese government to show they care about the personal information of millions of Australians by taking action on this front, and I call upon them to urgently extend the system by introducing the coalition's Trusted Digital Identity Bill 2021. I commend the motion to the House.

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