Pat Conaghan (Cowper, National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Social Services) Share this | Hansard source

I'm pleased to rise to talk on the Digital ID Bill 2024 and the related bill. My electorate of Cowper is around 8,000 square kilometres, so it's not a huge electorate, but it's big enough that it allows me to conduct mobile offices around the electorate. Every week I will go to a different place, find a hall somewhere and meet constituents. Sometimes I go to The Pub With No Beer up at Taylors Arm and constituents come and meet me on the verandah there. They talk about a whole range of issues, whether that's Centrelink, child care or aged care. Sometimes it's about local council issues. Sometimes it's about state issues. Quite often people just want to come along and meet the local member.

Over the past six or eight months, I have to say that, overwhelmingly, the people who have been attending those mobile offices, as well as emailing my office, have been speaking to me about their concerns in relation to the Digital ID Bill. They have concerns about privacy, government intervention and their freedoms. Just because I'm out the back of the bush in halls and in the corners of pubs doesn't mean that it's the tinfoil-hat brigade coming to see me to raise their concerns. These are mums and dads, grandmothers and grandfathers, business owners and farmers. Everyday people out there are coming to talk to me about their concerns. They're saying, 'Pat, you've got to represent us in parliament against the Digital ID Bill.'

I've printed out three emails from constituents. The first email is from Angie: 'Please vote no. It is an unsafe idea, as hackers are getting smarter, as recent events show clearly. The Australian public (your voters) do not want this digital ID or wish to be discriminated against if we choose not to use it (while that is still an option). We are a free country. Let's keep it that way and err on the side of caution.'

The second email—and I get multiple of these every single day—is from Peter: 'Please vote against the Digital ID Bill. Your privacy, my privacy, our freedom—all at risk. Digital ID will become the tool for big government and big corporations to monitor, track and control us. The Digital ID Bill is a Trojan horse that threatens to transform our democratic society into a surveillance state. Please share this petition widely to help us stop this before it's too late.'

This last one is a bit longer, but I feel that I need to read it out because it is so balanced. It's from Steve: 'Dear Sir, I write regarding the Digital ID bill. As my representative in parliament, I urge you to reject and oppose this insidious bill on my behalf. I appeal to your integrity and your humanity to make the debate clear in your mind. As you know, this country is not the country you and I grew up in. I am 62 this year and I know there is something terrible happening to our country and the world. No-one can doubt the advantages of digital communications and computing but, in my opinion, the digital/AI machine is not being used for the betterment of humanity. I am beyond making arguments politically. This issue is about our humanity. Are we going to surrender our rights to the arbitrary decisions of the machine—a machine obviously being utilised by a nefarious power? I will not comply with any "digital ID requirements". I am an Australian, born in Sydney and raised in New South Wales, and I know who I am.' As a closing statement, 'I am so very tired of seeing division being cultivated by our very own governments.'

So there's a cross-section of very reasonable people who are expressing their real fears of this intervention into their lives through the Digital ID Bill. You have to ask why people are coming to me in droves over this very issue and lobbying me to come down here and speak the truth. If government wants policy passed, they have to have the trust of the public. They have to garner the trust of the public. Why does the government not have the trust of the public on this very issue? It's because over the Christmas period there was a one-month consultation period. When governments push something through over the Christmas period, what they're trying to do is fly under the radar. We've seen it time and time again. Not only did they have the consultation period over a month—a short period of time, considering the impact that this bill could have on our communities—but Labor gagged debate in the Senate. They gagged debate on this very bill. Why? That is the question the public is asking: why did they do that? When Labor don't stand up and offer a reason or give another opportunity for a consultation period, the only reason the public could ascertain is that it was for sinister reasons. They do not want this bill. They want their freedom. They want their privacy respected.

Do you know who does want this bill? The banks. The banks want this bill, and they will worm their way into the government's pockets and say, 'We need this information for the betterment of society,' and they will use your information for their own financial purposes. They will gather your information, and we're seeing it already. We're seeing it already with the banks' ESG—their environmental and social governance. If you don't comply with their train of thought, they can freeze your accounts or they can say, 'I'm sorry, you don't have the privilege of being our customer anymore.' I've seen it happen in my electorate. So the banks would welcome this—all your information. They would use that information that you hold so closely.

The other people, not too far away from the banks, who will love this are the crooks, the criminals. We have seen breaches of privacy time and time again over the last 12 or 18 months to two years. The last one was in a club where you now have to scan your licence and they take all your details. You don't just have to prove you're over 18; you've got to say: 'There are all my details. There's my date of birth. There's my licence number.' Why on earth do clubs need all that? In my day you just had to prove you had a licence and were over 18, and you walked straight in. Now it's: 'There's all my information. Please don't get hacked.' And that's exactly what's happened. All the information from New South Wales clubs went out to a criminal. And they are getting more and more sophisticated.

Imagine a world where these bills proceed and all your information is gathered and put into the system, and some brilliant hacker gets it. They will use that for their own purposes; we're seeing it now with ransomware. But what happens if they have all your details and a hacker hacks the system and decides: 'Rather than doing that, I'm going to make sure you no longer exist. I'm going to wipe your details'? This is not beyond the realm of possibility. You wake up one day, and, on paper, you no longer exist. You ring the bank and they say, 'I'm sorry, you don't exist anymore.' You go to the hospital and they say, 'I'm sorry, we don't have any records of Medicare.' This is why we need to keep our details private. This is why we shouldn't be handing out every single piece of information to big government to infect our lives.

Australia is a free country and should remain a free country. We should have the right to say 'no'. One of the biggest problems with these bills is the voluntariness of being involved. We put forward some amendments to ensure that that would happen, and Labor voted them down. Why? Is the next step, 'There is no option; you must comply'? Last week I went back and—I hadn't read it for a long time—read George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, which, interestingly, was written in 1949. Winston Smith, the main character, spoke of his worries about where the government was in his life, and in every room you went into there was a TV that could see you, and it knew exactly where you were at a particular time of day, knew exactly what transaction you'd made and put out what the public should think. It was incredible, reading this book and thinking: 'This is where we are now. This is exactly where we're heading.' The next step will be that government will have complete control over us. This is not what we want. We want the freedoms of the past. We don't want government telling us what to do.

There are many diverse reasons that people come and see me and are opposing these bills. But the biggest one is the freedoms that we enjoy right now, followed by the real fears that their information will end up in the wrong hands. This is exactly why we should not support these bills.

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