Fiona Martin (Reid, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Home Affairs. Will the minister update the House on the work the Morrison government is doing to safeguard Australia's economic growth and comeback from the COVID-19 recession, particularly by strengthening critical infrastructure and combatting cyberthreats?

Peter Dutton (Dickson, Liberal Party, Minister for Home Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member for her question. Obviously, as we've pointed out on many occasions, the Morrison government is dedicated to keeping Australians safe. It doesn't matter whether it's in the real world or online, we want to make sure that our laws are designed to protect young families, designed to protect small businesses, designed to protect senior Australians. We want people to be able to operate online in a safe way. Sadly, during the course of COVID, we've seen a dramatic ramp up in the number of cyberattacks on Australians, not just by criminal syndicates, but by state based actors as well. This government won't stand for it. We have put in place additional support—$1.67 billion through the Cyber Security Strategy 2020—to provide a greater awareness.

As we know there would be many small businesses across the country at the moment that, without their online presence, would have gone into bankruptcy. People would have been out of work. Those people would have lost their homes, and there would have been devastation for all of those people involved in that outcome. We want businesses to be able to operate online. We want them to do it in a safe way.

There is a lot of work that we're doing through the Cyber Security Strategy, including employing 100 additional dedicated cyberinvestigators. The work of the Federal Police with its national and international counterparts is very important here, particularly to counter the work of malicious state actors. We've seen, during the course of COVID, attacks on the providers of water networks to regional areas. We have seen attacks on logistics and transport companies. We've seen attacks on health and aged-care companies, and a myriad of small businesses. If there is a successful attack, for example on an electricity network, obviously the consequences are very significant—it can mean that people cannot tap and go when they turn up to their local supermarket or to the service station; it can mean that the accounting records of a small business are held by the criminal syndicate until a ransom is paid—and so we are working day and night to make sure that we can keep Australians safe online. We have introduced legislation and we have further legislation to come before this House which will provide those protections and will see us working even more closely with those businesses, because we want to keep Australians safe in the real society and we want to keep people safe online. Our agencies are dedicated to making sure that outcome is achievable.