Andrew Hastie (Canning, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On behalf of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security I am pleased to present the committee's advisory report on the Identity-matching Services Bill 2019 and the Australian Passports Amendment (Identity-matching Services) Bill 2019.

Report made a parliamentary paper in accordance with standing order 39(e).

by leave—Both are reintroduced bills that were referred to the committee for review in the 45th parliament. In examining these most recent bills the committee resolved to accept all previous evidence received and was provided with 20 further submissions for this new review. I will speak on the Identity-matching Services Bill 2019 first. The purpose of this bill is to facilitate a secure, automated and accountable exchange of identity information between the Commonwealth and state and territory governments. It proposes to do this through establishing a range of services that identify, recognise or verify a facial image and systems that allow collation, access, use, sharing and disclosure of biometric data.

The bill authorises the Department of Home Affairs to create and maintain facilities, such as an interoperability hub, which would operate as a router for participating bodies to access identity-matching services and the national driver licence facial recognition solution, which would contain identity documents such as drivers' licences from all states and territories. Participating bodies would need a legal basis for accessing the facilities and certain access requirements would apply.

The genesis of the bill came from the need to combat the growing incidence of identity crime, which has devastating impacts on individuals and the economy. The bill seeks to do this by implementing a framework for national identity-matching services as part of measures agreed to by COAG leaders on 5 October 2017 contained within the Intergovernmental Agreement on Identity-matching Services. The bill also serves to boost the effectiveness of existing services through expanding the type and quantity of biometric data and by housing it in a centralised location with strict access criteria.

Many participants to this review expressed broad support for the underlying objectives and rationale of the bill. For example, one submitter welcomed 'measures that aimed to address identity-related crime and enable law enforcement bodies to cooperate to achieve this objective'. Statements such as this were echoed through the evidence the committee received. However, some participants raised with the committee a need to ensure appropriate governance, accountability and protection of the individual's right to privacy. The committee acknowledges these concerns and believes that while the bill's explanatory memorandum sets out governance arrangements such as existing and contemplated agreements and access policy, they are not adequately set out in the current bill. In the committee's view, robust safeguards and appropriate oversight mechanisms should be explained clearly in the legislation.

The committee also expresses broad support for the objectives of the bill but agrees that the bill, as it stands, does not adequately incorporate enough detail. It is for this reason that the committee recommends that the Identity-matching Services Bill 2019 be redrafted according to the following principles: (1) the regime should be built around privacy, transparency and subject to robust safeguards; (2) the regime should be subject to parliamentary oversight and reasonable proportionate and transparent functionality; (3) the regime should be one that requires annual reporting on the use of the identity-matching services; and (4) the primary legislation should specifically require that there is a participation agreement that sets out the obligations of all parties participating in the identity-matching services in detail. Additionally, the committee recommends that the redrafted bill be referred to the committee for further review.

The committee also simultaneously examined the Australian Passports Amendment (Identity-matching Services) Bill 2019. The passport bill proposes amendments to the Australian Passports Act 2005, which would authorise the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to disclose information in order to participate in identity-matching services and provides for computerised decision-making in confirming identity. This bill would also support the objectives of the IMS bill by making Australian travel document data available to identity-matching services by the interoperability hub.

Again, submitters supported the broad objectives of this bill. Few objections were raised but there were some concerns regarding the use of automated decision-making, in particular where unfavourable outcomes were made for the subject. Most felt that an element of human decision-making should be kept and that avenues for review of decisions should be implicitly incorporated into the bill. The committee agrees and recommends that the bill should be amended to ensure that automated decision-making can only be used for decisions that produce favourable or neutral outcomes for the subject and that automated decisions should not negatively affect outcomes.

The committee recognises that redrafting of the Identity-matching Services Bill 2019 may have consequential effects to the passports bill. Should this occur this, this report also recommends that the amended passports bill also be referred to the committee for further review. I want to reiterate the importance of the objectives of these bills and that these objectives have the committee's full support. Wanting to ensure the safety and security of all Australians is something we all have in common but we also need to protect citizens' rights whilst doing so. I commend the report to the House.

Mark Dreyfus (Isaacs, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I seek leave to make a short statement.

Leave granted.

The Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security is declining to recommend the passage of the Identity-matching Services Bill 2019. Instead, Labor and Liberal members of the committee are uniting to recommend that the Identity-matching Services Bill 2019 be completely redrafted and referred back to the intelligence and security committee for further inquiry when it is reintroduced. In taking this step, I congratulate all members of the committee for putting the national interest first and sending a strong message about the value of this committee.

The Identity-Matching Services Bill purports to facilitate the exchange of identity information pursuant to the objectives of an intergovernmental agreement reached by COAG in October 2017, but it includes none of the limitations or safeguards anticipated by that agreement. The bill includes almost no limitations or safeguards at all.

As explained in the committee's report, the Identity-Matching Services Bill would authorise the Department of Home Affairs to create and maintain facilities for the sharing of facial images and other identity information between government agencies and, in some cases, nongovernment entities. The bill would also authorise the Department of Home Affairs to develop and maintain two centralised facilities for the provision of what I called 'identity-matching services'. The first of these two facilities would be called an interoperability hub. The hub would act as a router through which government agencies across Australia could request and transmit information as part of an identity-matching service. The second would be a federated database of information contained in government identity documents. As discussed in the committee's report, the potential implications of these two new facilities for the privacy of all Australians are profound. Those implications do not appear to have even been considered by the Minister for Home Affairs or by his department.

While the bill provides for six different identity-matching services, the service that elicited the most concern from submitters to the committee's inquiry was the face identification service. That service would enable authorities across Australia to use huge databases of facial images to determine the identity of an unknown person. Using that service, a law enforcement agency could submit a facial image for matching against a database of facial images contained in government identification documents, such as a database containing every driver licence photo in Australia. In return, the agency would receive a small number of matching or near-matching facial images from the database. The agency could then access biographical information associated with those images.

The potential for such a service to be used for mass or blanket surveillance, such as CCTV being used to identify Australians going about their business in real time, was raised by numerous submitters to the inquiry. The Australian Human Rights Commissioner, for example, submitted that the bill 'appears to contemplate intrusive surveillance of persons or, indeed, of the community at large before any crime has been committed and indeed, potentially, before there is any reason to believe that a particular crime will be committed.' Like my colleagues on the committee, I do not believe that the government is proposing to engage in or to facilitate the mass surveillance of Australians, but I do accept that, given the near complete absence of legislated safeguards in the Identity-Matching Services Bill 2019, those concerns cannot simply be ignored. If there is no intention for the proposed identity-matching services to be used to engage in mass surveillance activities, the government should not object to amending the bill to ensure that those services cannot, as a matter of law, be used in that manner.

Concerns were also raised about the proposed one-to-many identity-matching service being used to identify people who are engaging in protest activity. This does concern me. It was only this month that the Minister for Home Affairs, the minister responsible for this very bill, called for mandatory prison sentences for people who engage in protest activity; called for the same people to have their welfare payments cancelled; and also called for them to be photographed and publicly shamed. As presently drafted, this bill would not prohibit authorities from using the proposed face-matching services to identify individuals in a crowd who are engaging in lawful protest activity. That would be concerning in the best of times; it is particularly concerning in the light of the authoritarian disposition of the Minister for Home Affairs.

A raft of other concerns was expressed about the Identity-Matching Services Bill, including in relation to this government's abysmal record on cybersecurity. I do not propose to list all of the concerns here today, but I encourage everyone to read about them in the committee's report.

I would like to thank my colleagues on the committee, Labor and Liberal, for their work on this important report. It should not escape anyone watching these proceedings today that, by agreeing to the set of recommendations contained in this report, the Liberal members of the committee have placed the national interest first. For that, I would like to pay tribute to Senators Stoker, Fawcett and Abetz, and the members for Canning, Berowra and Goldstein. I would like to pay particular tribute and extend my thanks to the chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee, the member for Canning. I also thank the committee secretariat for their excellent work, both in this parliament and in the last parliament, which underpins this report.