Peta Murphy (Dunkley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Speaker, like those who have spoken before me, I want to take this opportunity—fortuitously given to me by having the adjournment spot tonight—to thank you for your outstanding service as Speaker and to personally thank you for the support and advice you gave me around the time of my first speech, which, as you know, was a difficult time. I will always be incredibly grateful for your kindness to me at that time.

I want to speak today about the really troubling explosion of scams being perpetrated against vulnerable people in my community and across the country which seems to have occurred during COVID. Of course, there were scams that were occurring before then, but it would seem that this pandemic, which should have been bringing the community closer together and perhaps making people pause about exploitation of vulnerable people, has instead been used by people, who I do not think have any morals or ethics, to scam vulnerable people. I want to tell the House about a constituent of mine who I met with last week and is so ashamed at having fallen for a scam and having had $45,500 stolen from him that he was reluctant for me to even use his first name in the chamber because he does not want people to know that he fell for it. I don't think he should be ashamed; I think he should be angry. I think he should be angry at the people who perpetrated the scam that I will explain, and I think he should be angry at how he has been let down by federal government agencies and processes that were not good enough.

My constituent is in his late 70s. He is a pensioner with limited assets, most of which he is using to support his wife, who is in poor health and in an aged-care facility. He had been saving up because he knows he will outlive his wife and he had a dream of going to Iceland. That's something he had been thinking about his whole life, and that is what he was going to do when he no longer was in the position of having his wife around to care for. He lives alone. He had a good career in the past and he uses his computer a lot and had an IT consultant to fix IT problems, like many of us are familiar with, who would access his computer to do it remotely. So, when he received a text message saying that Telstra was going to update the NBN, followed by a phone call saying that Telstra needed to update the NBN to his place but they needed to get remote access to his computer to do it, he did not really think that it was unusual, having been used to that practice. Sadly, it was not Telstra. What ended up happening was people got access to his bank account details and, in the course of four different transactions over a couple of days, transferred $45,500—his savings for that long-planned trip—out of his bank account.

It would seem that, because the first leg of the transactions went to an Australian account before going to wherever it ended up, it didn't trigger any anti-money-laundering provisions, even though the transfers were just under $10,000 each. While his bank has given him some of the money back, it is a small fraction of what he lost. He called Scamwatch and ACORN. He said to me, 'After I contacted the government bodies Scamwatch and ACORN to report my experience, neither indicated particular interest in my case nor offered assistance, so I'm relying solely on the bank paying me something back.' It is just not good enough. That's why I am very pleased that Labor has an antiscam policy that we will take to the next election to establish a national antiscams centre to fund identification recovery services and to make it easier to help people recover their money. It won't help my constituent, but it will help so many other vulnerable people who shouldn't be targeted in this way.

Tony Smith (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I call the member for Herbert.