Aaron Violi (Casey, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

First, I must echo the sentiments of the member for Nicholls. Like him, we have regional communications challenges in Casey, and it's so important that we continue to invest in connectivity for our farmers and for our residents who live in those agricultural areas. As a regional and peri-urban area, Casey has those challenges. I definitely concur with the member for Nicholls's wonderful contribution.

But today I rise to speak on the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Information Disclosure, National Interest and Other Measures) Bill 2022. In essence, this bill will allow telecommunications companies to more easily provide assistance to law enforcement agencies and emergency service organisations in order to prevent crime and serious life-threatening situations. It's important that we get this legislation right. On a very basic level, these proposals do make a lot of sense, and there are a lot of strong arguments for why we need to implement this legislation, which is why the opposition is going to support these changes.

It's clear that it's advantageous for emergency services to be able to access location data as quickly as possible when people are missing. We know that, in situations when people are missing, minutes and hours make a significant difference, so it is important that emergency services have all the support they need to protect Australians when they're in danger. But we also need to recognise and acknowledge the threats that exist, particularly in the new digital world that we live in. I'll talk a little bit about the importance of this bill but also about some of the challenges we need to address, because this bill will confer civil immunities on telecommunications companies for the provision of reasonably necessary assistance to the Commonwealth, states or territories to respond during emergencies if a national emergency declaration is made. It's going to amend the existing requirements to record disclosures by telecommunications companies, so it will give more support and more data to those communications companies.

We've seen, clearly with Optus and Medibank, that our nation faces cybersecurity challenges in protecting our citizens, and we need to acknowledge that they are very real. Whether it's government infrastructure, business data or individual consumer data, the reality is that that data is being attacked every day, and we need to ensure that, if we're giving organisations a greater ability to access this data, it's going to be used in the right way.

Unfortunately, we need to acknowledge in this current environment that bad apples do exist. As much as we wouldn't like it to be the case, there can sometimes be people within organisations that will do the wrong thing and take advantage of having access to that data. We've seen many cases, particularly and shamelessly in domestic violence situations, where location data has been misused. We always need to ensure not only that we are allowing emergency services access to people's locations to find people when they in danger but also that there are appropriate safeguards so that people are looked after and that it's not misused. That's why we need to take our time to make sure we get this right.

This bill is quite important because it highlights the challenges that we face in this House when we're drafting legislation, particularly and primarily regarding technology. It's something that I spoke about in my first speech, having spent the last three years working in the digital economy. The tech and digital environment moves at an extremely fast pace. As we're talking right now, there are a lot of smart people working on new technology and new opportunities that will provide benefits to us as a community, to citizens and to governments, but will also create challenges in this House. We, rightly, have important processes that we need to go through to protect our citizens, and that's why we need to continue to legislate as fast as possible. But we don't want to go too quickly, because, if we get it wrong—like the great old saying—there's no point locking the gate once the horse has bolted. That saying is very true for farmers and cattlemen—there's nothing worse than locking the gates once a horse is out—but it's equally true for technology and data because once your data is available on the internet or the dark web you can't get it back. That's the fact and the reality of what we're dealing with. So if we're allowing organisations to have easier access—even if they are emergency services—unfortunately, we know that there have been people within emergency services throughout history that have misused data before. We need to allow for that risk and to protect that risk, and that's why my belief and that of the opposition is that it is very important that we send this to a Senate committee so it can understand the privacy issues and the data issues. We absolutely support the need for this legislation—that's beyond doubt. What the question is, is: how do we protect our citizens that are missing but also give everyone else the benefit of what they need in terms of their security being protected? The power of this technology access can't be underestimated in terms of tracking where people are and what they're looking to do.

This bill responds to several recommendations, including by the Australian Law Reform Commission and state coroners, about the current drafting of the act, which requires the threat to life or health be imminent. This has hindered the disclosure of information around the disclosure of the location of missing persons in the past, and can be determined by mobile phone triangulation. It's so important that we get that right, and what the definition of 'imminent' is. I know this was subject to a New South Wales deputy coroner recommendation. They wrote to the minister in October of this year, recommending amendments to the act following the inquest into the disappearance of a person in Sydney. There is a strong case for this, but it is important to understand and to recognise that the coroner is looking at how we can prevent this happening again, which is absolutely their responsibility, but they're looking through a very narrow lens of how we stop it happening again. This is the scope of their responsibility, but our responsibility and the minister's responsibility in this House when that recommendation comes in from an expert in a very narrow field is to look and understand what the intended and unintended consequences are of this decision and this change. The reality is that in this House every decision we make has consequences. Many we can predict, but history shows us that there are many unintended consequences. As I said before, we know with the digital world that if we get these things wrong and the unintended consequences happen, we can't change it. We can't go back in time and unlock that change. That's why it's so important that a Senate committee looks at this, hears from experts around the privacy challenges that we face and makes sure that we are protecting people at both levels of this process.

It is important that we do have access to missing people's mobile phone location data. Technology has allowed us to use triangulation to find people, and it is a great asset that we do have in the current modern world. That's why the coalition rolled out the advanced mobile location technology to provide greater location accuracy to triple 0 services during an emergency call from a mobile phone. That was something that the coalition were proud to pull out in their time in government to save lives and make a difference. This bill does build on that work by making it easier for law enforcement and emergency service agencies to access mobile phone data which can be critical. The Telecommunications Act includes the general prohibitions on carriers and carrier services disclosing certain information or documents, including telecommunications data. However, there are some important exceptions, including where disclosure of this information is reasonably necessary to prevent or lessen a serious and imminent threat to the life or health of a person. This goes to the heart of this discussion and how we get the balance right. This is a tricky conversation, because the world 'imminent'—which is the one that is being proposed to be taken out—does make a lot of sense and reflects the concerns of the state coroners and the Australian Law Reform Commission that the qualifier is creating too high a threshold on access to mobile phone location data.

The bill also allows for the use of disclosure of unlisted numbers if someone calls an emergency services number and, for example, can't provide a location of an emergency. There are some really important initiatives here, clarifying that service providers and telecommunication providers and intermediaries will not be liable for damages when they act in good faith in providing reasonable and necessarily assistance to emergency services organisations. Notwithstanding that, the opposition is concerned that the government has failed to adequately consult—

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