Terry Young (Longman, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Some things in this place are very black-and-white, and others are little bit grey. Being a pragmatist, I try to take on both sides of the debate and understand it from both points of view. There's no question that I have heard a lot of terrible tales about cybersecurity and cyberattacks from constituents who have lost an awful lot of money over the last few years.

The Digital ID Bill, on the surface, goes to address that issue, which is a good thing. On one hand, I'm a lot more comfortable with one organisation having my details than 20. For example, if I wanted to open an account with Optus or a bank, or whomever, rather than having to give all of these different organisations my information, the idea of giving it to one organisation, such as the government—which, in theory, would spend and invest a lot more money in securing that information than a business would, because for a business it's an expense that doesn't return any value to them, whereas governments have an obligation to protect people—on the surface it seems like a good bill. But, deep down, whenever I face these questions where I can see the good in it but I can also see the bad in it, the question I always ask myself is: does it take away the freedom of choice? That must be protected, above everything else we have in this country. This bill takes away that freedom. It has the potential to.

The government are saying that it is a choice, and on the surface it looks like that. But when you read deep down and go into section 74 of the bill, there are exemptions. We've only got to go back to what happened during COVID with the state governments. Even though vaccinations were a choice, for many people they did not feel like a choice. They couldn't go to work, they couldn't go to a football game, they couldn't go to a pub, they couldn't go interstate, they couldn't go to a funeral, they couldn't go to a wedding. That doesn't sound like much of a choice. This has the potential to do exactly the same thing, and that is my concern. It's a deprivation of human liberties. We must protect that, because the greatest gift we have ever been given as human beings is the gift to choose. When we take that away from people, we dehumanise them—we take away their humanity. We can't do that.

I'm also concerned with the fact that what will happen is corporations and businesses, because they want most of all to report a great return to their shareholders—which is their job—will do it at whatever cost to their consumer and their customer. And if they can find that this will make them more money on their bottom line—saving money from having to go through arduous other ways of finding ID and confirming someone's details—they will take it up. Then they will bring in policies that say, 'You can't open an account with us unless you go through this process.' Again, this is taking away choice. You just cannot take away that choice.

We're seeing it more and more, and we've heard make an account unless you go through this process. We've heard people speaking a lot about Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World, and all those sorts of things. I don't want to dwell on these things because, at the end of the day they're fictional. But people are correlating how much it's starting to seem like that. I believe that it's our job as people in the parliament to sit there and, pragmatically, look at both sides. I always try to do that because I think that most legislation that's introduced has a great motivation, and I don't think this is any exception. But we've got to drill down on the detail and make sure that it's actually going to do what it's designed to do, and I cannot see it doing that.

The biggest issue with this is that, when the coalition started to work on this—and I was on the committee that was working on this particular piece of policy, and I was never a fan of it—we said that it must be a choice; it cannot be mandatory. If it had stayed on that path, I may have reluctantly gone along with it, but the fact of the matter is that with section 74 that won't happen. I also understand that there are people out there who want to give their information to the government. You know what? That's their right. They have the same rights as a person who doesn't want to give their information to the government. Both groups of people should have their rights protected to make that choice.

As far as I'm concerned, the coalition has made the right decision in opposing the bill as it stands. The amendments would have made it a greater debate. I think the government have done themselves a disservice by not even considering the amendments and rushing it through because they're trying to hide it through budget week. I think that they will pay the price for that, because there will be a backlash from the electorate, because the Australian people, more than anything, want their freedoms protected.

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