Keith Wolahan (Menzies, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I will. The two that I know of are NAB and CBA—there you go. They did that at a time when many people were exiting car parks and couldn't pay for them, with a huge queue behind them; many people, like me, were embarrassed in front of their friends and family at restaurants; many people had things to do. For the convenience of the bank, just to know what your ID was, even if you had been with them for decades, they could switch off your banking like that. They could disconnect you from your ability to be part of the economy. Very few people carry cash after COVID. There's even a push to get rid of cash. We make people vulnerable to that. So you can understand the suspicion that people will have with how their digital identification is used and the suspicion that they have with how vulnerable they are in the digital economy.

At the heart of this is trust. I don't want to relitigate the referendum, but those same banks donated millions of dollars to one side of a campaign that was out of whack with the same people whom they were shutting off from being able to pay for things. Perhaps those millions would have been better served (a) paying for Indigenous disadvantage directly and (b) having people on the call lines so that people who were struck in restaurants and shops, who were having bills cut off and who were stuck in carparks weren't waiting for an emergency call like that. There is a disconnect between the priorities of some of corporate Australia and the realities of what Australians are facing. We saw that on the weekend, and I hope they reflect on that.

When we combine those two issues of bringing people with you—not taking them for granted—and acknowledging their legitimate distrust in how the digital economy can be weaponised against them in the most significant way, where you cannot even pay for basics and you are humiliated in front of others on a large scale—I've had a significant amounts of calls on that—I think this is an example and a process that should be done much better. We have to respect the legitimate concerns of people, particularly when it comes to privacy and their digital identity, and that is one of the many lessons that should be learned from Saturday.

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