Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party, Shadow Minister for International Development and the Pacific) Share this | Hansard source

Freedom is important. We just heard 15 minutes of why freedom is important to the member for Kennedy, and I understand much of what he said. I completely understand where he's coming from. He, like me, represents a country electorate, and people in country electorates take their freedom very seriously indeed.

I know, from when I was deputy chair of the NSC, that national security is, of course, the hallmark of a good government. We banned Huawei, and I know that, following that decision, which didn't go down well in Beijing, Britain followed suit. Estonia, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Portugal, Romania and Sweden—the list goes on and on—were concerned that Huawei, a leading global provider of ICT infrastructure and smart devices, would have too much control over the information disseminating around our nation and the nations that I just mentioned. Indeed, would they have control over systems where our hospitals were operating or over traffic lights? These are important discussions to have. As a government, you need to ensure that the safety and security of your people is No. 1. At the time, Huawei was a sponsor of the Canberra Raiders rugby league football club in the National Rugby League, and there was a lot of pressure on Australia. I raise that, in the context of this important debate, because freedoms are important, and they are certainly important to those who sit on the same side of the parliament that I do.

I am perturbed that, in the death throes of the final parliamentary sitting week of the Senate, not that long ago, this particular legislation, the Digital ID Bill 2024, was rushed through and guillotined by a government that, when it came in in May 2022, said that it would be more transparent, said that it would be more open, and said that it would respect parliamentary procedure, protocols and process. Yet on this, and on other bills, it did not. Even when you think back to 12 months ago, the appropriation bills for the second budget brought down by the member for Rankin were guillotined. I have never in all of my time here—and this is my fifth term—seen the appropriation bills being shut off and members not being allowed to speak on those particular bills. Why we would have a digital identity bill with members unable to speak on it is beyond reason and beyond belief.

These amendments which were put forward to enhance privacy protections for Australians who choose to use digital IDs were not supported. We oppose these bills; we believe they're half baked. And it's not just the coalition which thinks that they're half baked and it isn't just the member for Kennedy or, I'm sure, others. I've had a lot of correspondence into my office, some from people who don't usually reach out about legislation—they just go with the flow. In particular, there were two emails I received where I felt it necessary that I put them on the parliamentary record, on the Hansard, because the people who sent them in were very concerned about the digital ID bills and what they might entail for them and for others. One was from Jenny Madden from Uranquinty. I've known Jenny for a long time. Jenny is a good citizen; she is a passionate Australian. She said:

Although I am a user of My Health record, and an enthusiastic advocate of such a resource, I am greatly disturbed by the potential ramifications of the Digital ID Bill 2024.

Even though I completely understand that it is more onerous to use numerous different identification documents such as birth certificates, passports, and driving licences to prove ID, it is in this very aspect of variation that safety lies. With the centralisation of data comes great danger.

Firstly, the Federal Government has a poor track record of securing our information. For example, in 2020, security researchers warned the public against using MyGovID due to security flaws in its design, which the Australian Tax Office declined to fix.

Moreover, an article published by the ABC last year titled "Cyber black market selling hacked ATO and MyGov logins shows Medibank and Optus only tip of iceberg" reported on numerous data breaches involving the Australian Tax Office, National Disability Insurance Scheme and MyGov.

But what I find even more concerning is that a single digital identity database could facilitate a system of surveillance of Australians not unlike that of China's social credit score system.

That's what Jenny Madden had to say. I understand completely where she's coming from. Dan Grentnell, of North Wagga, said:

I would like to express my disapproval of the proposed digital ID legislation on behalf of my family, myself, and I think the majority of people of the Riverina and Australia who actually know how much of an overreach of government this is.

Australians have to ask themselves—do they really want the government acting as gatekeeper over every aspect of your life, I know I certainly do not.

These two are just normal, everyday, ordinary Australians but they speak for a lot of people. They're good people and what they have put in their emails to me are concerns that I know would be shared by a number of regional Australians and a number of Australians, full stop.

I know that more than 10 million people already use the Australian government ID system via myGov ID. I get that the banks and, dare I say it, even supermarket loyalty cards have a lot of information on people. But only recently I had the bank that I have been with since I was a teenager—and rest assured that is a long time ago, more's the pity!—pursuing me via text and email to actually identify who I was. All they required was my driver's licence number—not only the licence number on the front but the number that appears in the back. I'm just going through the process of renewing my licence and I now have a paper form from New South Wales. The number on the back of that wasn't the number they required so I have to ring the bank back and give the proper number when I get my little laminated licence in the mail in coming weeks. I digress, but as I said to the person on the end of the phone when I finally rang under the threat of having bank accounts closed: 'Fair dinkum! If you can't find my name, just do a Google search! And don't believe everything you read when you do that Google search!' But I was worried about being scammed because so many people get text messages via their mobile phones and via their iPads and they get emails from supposed trustworthy institutions, but they are from scammers in far-off countries who just want to take their money, get their identity and use it.

I know that a lot of MPs use social media and many MPs have people putting up fake accounts purporting to be those members. I also know that we've been told not to use TikTok. I can't understand why any MP would want to use TikTok. They might want to reach out to younger members, but it is a security risk.

People are also concerned with this particular legislation and they are concerned not only with the contents of it. How can Australians trust Labor to manage digital ID when they won't even allow parliamentary scrutiny? And why does the government feel the need to rush legislation such as this through, if it is so important that people's representatives in the parliament can't speak on it. I'm glad I've got the opportunity, but my Senate colleagues were not given that opportunity. For a government that said that they would be more transparent, why did they rush this through the Senate in the finishing hours of that last parliamentary sitting week? Labor's bills don't adequately ensure that the bill is truly voluntary, yet every Australian deserves to receive the same quality of services regardless of how they're accessing them, be it through traditional ID or face to face and so forth.

The government shouldn't proceed with these bills until such time as they've reformed the Privacy Act. There should be simultaneous private sector participation in the Australian government digital identity system to ensure that the digital ID is a truly national, whole-of-economy solution.

When in government, we did some careful, calibrated work to progress the AGDIS—the digital identity system. We worked hard, we worked in good faith, we took on board consultation from stakeholders and we made sure that what we were doing was transparent. Unfortunately, I can't say the same about this. There are many, many Australians who are concerned that hacking and professionally done security flaws and breaches will happen as a result of this sort of system, if and when it is enacted.

We released, as the coalition government, draft legislation in 2021 to further regulate digital identity. The important word in that sentence is 'draft'. We put it out there, we made sure that people were able to have a good look at it, we made sure that people were able to respond to their local members of parliament, because that's what being a federal member of the House of Representatives is—it's about taking feedback from the constituency. But this was done, so to speak, in the dead of night. This was done on a whim by Labor, and I have to say there's been a lot happen this year, there just has—a lot of legislation and a lot of things done in the parliament.

This particular legislation and the National Disability Insurance Scheme are probably the two things that my office—my electorate offices at Wagga Wagga and Parkes—have received the most traffic about. When it happened so quickly and was so rushed through the Senate in that parliamentary sitting week, I was inundated with emails. I was surprised and amazed at how many people approached me when I was out at events and in the street and wherever else I happened to be in my local communities, by the number of people who came up to me and asked me about it because they were that concerned. That's not normally the case. People will often get animated about things that might happen in the budget, things that didn't happen in the budget and all that sort of thing. But the amount of people who were very concerned that their privacy was going to be breached because of what Labor did in rushing this through the Senate, quite frankly surprised me.

The digital identity legislation introduced by the Albanese Labor government is very, very different to the draft bill which the coalition released. That concerns me, as well. The coalition put forward amendments designed to fix what we see as weaknesses in the bill. Our amendments included the following: a much stronger guarantee that having a digital identity would be voluntary; that no Australian would be required to have one; that someone would not face a lower quality of service should they wish to use traditional paper based identity documents; removing the phasing provisions so that the private sector could be involved from the outset—how important is that?—and imposing a clear requirement that the changes to the Privacy Act must be made before this legislation came into force.

As a reasonable person, I would have thought that those amendments were reasonable to the government. They weren't onerous. We were working in a bipartisan fashion with the government to try to strengthen legislation that Labor felt the need to just ram through the Senate. It always bothers me when legislation starts in the Senate and then our representatives in the Senate—the fine states' house that it is—do not get the opportunity to speak. The amendments were just brushed aside. That bothers me. The government refused to accept our amendments, more is the pity. Accordingly, the coalition voted to oppose the government's digital identity legislation because, as I said a short time ago, it is half baked—that's a good description of it. We want to make sure that any legislation that comes before the House is what it ought to be and is given proper consideration not just in this place, the parliament on the hill, but indeed right throughout this wide brown land.

Sitting suspended from 12 : 56 to 16 : 00

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