Max Chandler-Mather (Griffith, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The Greens will support this bill, the Privacy and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2024, in the House but reserve our position in the Senate. We do this because although this first tranche of reforms is generally positive it fails to deliver what is needed to truly protect privacy in a way that meets the expectations of the community in this country.

This bill includes a handful of reforms in response to the Privacy Act review such as increased protection for children's privacy and modest enhanced regulatory powers. It also includes a statutory tort of privacy, which is a right of action to seek damages for serious breaches of privacy, in the criminalisation of doxxing—the malicious release of personal information online. This tort will also allow individuals to sue for serious invasions of privacy in circumstances where the individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy, but subject to some limitations. That's a long overdue reform, though we acknowledge concerns that it will be very hard for regular people to use this to protect their privacy due to the costs and legal complexity.

The bill also provides for transparency for automated decision-making, requiring privacy policies to disclose any use of personal information in automated decision-making which significantly affects individuals' interests. This needs to happen within two years of the reforms coming into effect. This is a positive and sensible change. The bill will also give the OAIC increased oversight powers but no new funding. The OAIC is already chronically overallocated and underfunded, not least in FOI matters. This bill does nothing to remedy that.

After more than two years in government and a decade of promises in opposition, this set of reforms from Labor is embarrassingly inadequate. It will not change the core fact that, even with these changes, Australia will still have a privacy law basically written in 1988 to deal with privacy issues in 2024 that were not even conceived of last century. It is increasingly clear that privacy reforms have not kept pace with the development of technology, and the result is that millions of Australians' data is at risk. We are lagging behind the world on making laws to protect privacy and limit corporate tracking of people. The government's failure to take this opportunity to act on that is deeply disappointing.

Under these laws, people will continue to be tracked across the internet, with their data sold through real-time bidding to advertisers but also potentially to scammers and others. Under these laws, corporations will monetise the data of individuals and be able to create profiles of them through data matching. Under these laws, poorly regulated data will continue to proliferate and everyone will be at risk as a result. It doesn't have to be this way. Jurisdictions around the world are drawing lines in the sand on privacy and standing up to the commercialisation of private data. In these places, governments have been willing to stand up against corporations exploiting personal and private information. It's time for that to happen here.

There is plenty more that should be in this bill, and the government's only response is that it might come at some unspecified point in the future in some tranche 2 privacy reforms. With the glacial pace of reform we have seen so far, no serious stakeholder, apart from the big social media platforms and online advertisers resisting privacy changes, has expressed any hope that the next round will be either timely or adequate. This is why we are reserving our position in the Senate and will be actively engaging in the Senate inquiry to make the changes needed now to keep our privacy, and that of our kids and friends, safe.

Question agreed to.

Bill read a second time.

Ordered that this bill be reported to the House without amendment.

Sitting suspended from 12:55 to 13:08

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