Paul Fletcher (Bradfield, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Government Services and the Digital Economy) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Statutory Declarations Amendment Bill 2023. This bill will provide practical savings in time and cost for Australians dealing with administrative tasks in life, work and business. The process of swearing a Commonwealth statutory declaration is something that many Australians undertake—for example, to support an application for sick leave or to verify a claim for a government service or payment. Around 3.8 million statutory declarations are executed each year by individuals and businesses alike. It takes time and effort. You have to find a justice of the peace or other suitably qualified witness. You have to find the form. There are several things you have to do. This bill will make life simpler for Australians and deliver time and cost savings. The bill will expand the ways in which Australians can successfully execute a Commonwealth statutory declaration. Electronic and digital methods of execution, which the bill gives effect to, will finally take their place alongside the traditional paper based method of using a wet-ink signature and in-person witnessing. For these reasons the Statutory Declarations Amendment Bill is uncontroversial, and the opposition is pleased to support it.

I want to express, though, my disagreement with the words of the Attorney-General, who, in introducing this bill last week, described it as 'unassuming and modest'. That observation simply highlights the reality that this Attorney-General and this government are not much interested in the productivity and efficiency benefits that digital identity can bring. This bill is a positive step, but the government could have done so much more. In my contribution to this debate, I want to, firstly, put this bill in its proper context by explaining its origins; secondly, make the case for urgent action on digital transformation and costumer focused leadership; and, thirdly, canvas the digital identity aspects of the bill and once again call for urgent action from this government on legislation for a national digital identity system.

Let me turn firstly to the origins of this bill, which arises from the hard work of the former coalition government. During the pandemic, the then coalition government introduced a range of temporary measures, including an amendment to section 8 of the Statutory Declarations Act. This allowed for a Commonwealth statutory declaration to be witnessed remotely via video link and signed electronically, in recognition of the COVID-era restrictions on movement, which applied under health orders and which, in turn, meant that witnessing a statutory declaration in person would have contravened those health orders. One of the things the bill before the House now does is to make permanent these measures which were originally proposed as temporary. What is fairly obvious when you examine the bill is that there hasn't been much deep or original thinking by this government in legislating what is, we agree, a sensible change. The idea of making permanent electronic execution of statutory declarations was taken forward by the previous government under our Deregulation Taskforce, and we issued the modernising document execution consultation paper in mid-2021. We brought together the states and territories through the Council on Federal Financial Relations, where it was agreed in June 2021 to prioritise working together towards a common approach for document execution.

I mentioned our Deregulation Taskforce, which took a systemic and factory-floor approach to cutting red tape. We worked systematically through the various steps which an ordinary business or consumer is required to take when interacting with government. Our aim was to identify and then be in a position to minimise or indeed eliminate some of those maddening bottlenecks, dead-ends and feedback loops that are the enemy of productivity and the enemy of good customer service. Through the work of the task force it was discovered that in 2019-20 small and medium enterprises took around nine million hours a year in printing and collecting statutory declarations, in travelling to the locations of authorised witnesses, in discussing and filling out declarations with witnesses, in making copies and finally in submitting completed declarations.

I draw the attention of the House to this short case study on what has been traditionally involved in completing statutory declarations in the traditional way and the savings that are possible in terms of time and cost through electronic execution because I want to make a broader point that, for the coalition, scrapping outmoded regulation is not the end in and of itself. It is a means to an end, and the end is improved productivity, reduced cost and better service delivery. Central to all of that is a customer-centric mindset when a government is engaging with citizens.

I want to turn therefore to the broader case for digital transformation. We have seen in Australia a very impressive demonstration of what can be done by a government which sets out to serve its citizens better. I refer of course to the former New South Wales coalition government and the tremendous work of then minister Victor Dominello, minister for customer service and digital government, backed by successive premiers in Gladys Berejiklian and Dom Perrottet. When the coalition government first came to power in New South Wales following many years of some of the worst Labor governments ever inflicted on the people of that state, Boston Consulting Group found that New South Wales had some of the worst customer satisfaction rates of any government, languishing between 69 per cent for individuals and 66 per cent for businesses. By 2019 that satisfaction rate had risen to a remarkable 95 per cent. That is a terrific example of how a customer service focus and the intelligent use of digital technology can improve the experience of citizens in dealing with government.

The federal coalition government sought to learn lessons from the success achieved in New South Wales, and we took the decision in 2019 to create Services Australia. Unfortunately, if you look at what is happening under the present government, we have seen a lack of progress, a lack of energy and a lack of enthusiasm when it comes to delivering better service to citizens, including through digital channels. We were told that there was going to be a federal whole-of-government digital investment fund, but that is nowhere to be seen. The myGov user audit was commissioned by this government and released in January, but the government is still yet to formally respond to it. We are now in September. There is still extensive use of paper based forms, particularly in relation to Medicare and the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme amongst others, and opportunities are being missed on a daily basis to use digital channels to better serve citizens in place of traditional paper-shuffling methods.

So there is a lot to get on with, but unfortunately the current Minister for Government Services, the member for Maribyrnong, does not show much enthusiasm or energy in this space. He's much more interested in playing politics, continuing to milk as much of the limelight as he can, if I can horribly mix a metaphor there. He's much more interested in trying to get as much attention as he can through seeking to continue to direct attention to the findings of the recent royal commission. That's what, it seems, excites the member for Maribyrnong. He's not at all excited or enthused about the day-to-day task of how to deliver better customer service to citizens. He has been conspicuous by his absence in debates on these issues in this parliament. The last time a bill went through this House which directly concerned his agency, Services Australia, the member for Maribyrnong couldn't be bothered to speak to it. That, of course, was the bill which axed the successful cashless debit card. I do hope we will see the Minister for Government Services, the member for Maribyrnong, speaking on this bill, and I do hope that he will also lift his game when it comes to the very poor customer service experience which Australians are increasingly facing under his stewardship.

Under this government we've seen a sharp rise in wait times for calls being made by Australians to Centrelink and pursuing Medicare payments. In 2020-21, under the coalition government, it took, for somebody calling the Disability, Sickness and Carers line, on average 20 minutes to reach a customer service officer. Under this government, over the period from 2022 to 31 March 2023, that average call hold time blew out to 28 minutes. That is an unacceptable deterioration in customer service. And just last month a top agency official admitted on Melbourne radio that Services Australia were 'understaffed in our service delivery'. Of course, we saw this minister, the member for Maribyrnong, in June this year dump 600 call centre jobs after he scrapped a multimillion-dollar contract with the specialist call centre provider Serco. I have no particular brief for Serco or any other provider, but I do make the point that experience suggests that, when you move away from using providers who are very specialised in this field, whose focus and expertise is to do with how you make the customer experience in calling into the call centre as good as possible—when you move away from specialised players like that—the likely outcome is a deterioration in the service that will be experienced by citizens in dealing with Centrelink and Services Australia.

The member for Maribyrnong has also fired over a thousand specialist ICT workers, which does raise the obvious question: what possible prospect is there of improving digital services in the digital service delivery channel when you have axed the talented tech workers who are needed to drive that transformation? It's for these reasons that the opposition has called for a review into the viability of Services Australia's current workforce arrangements, including examining the impact of its contractor cuts and the health of its digital service delivery channels. Of course, so far the government has completely failed to engage with this perfectly sensible call.

I want to turn next to the most consequential elements of the bill before the House, which I reiterate is certainly not unassuming and modest, despite the ill-judged words of the Attorney-General. The consequential part of the bill goes to the introduction of digital verification. When the provisions in this bill come into law, an Australian will be able to choose to digitally verify his or her statutory declaration through an approved online platform, using that person's digital identity. Further, once this bill passes into law, the government will be empowered to prescribe myGov as an approved online platform and myGovID as an approved identity provider. There is a strong economic case for using digital identity in this way. In his second reading speech, the Attorney-General cited some analysis that was done in work launched by the former coalition government under our Deregulation Taskforce, to which I have already referred. This economic analysis, which was conducted in 2021, estimated that digital execution could result in time and cost savings across the economy valued at over $156 million a year. More recent work on this front has been carried out through the myGov user audit, which I referred to previously, an important piece of work even though more than eight months later the government has not chosen to respond to any of its recommendations. According to that work, the old way of using a written signature and physical witnessing is costing small and medium businesses and consumers over $400 million a year in direct costs and time. Plainly, if we can transform a paper based process into a digital one, that will have a positive economic effect.

I do welcome the fact that the government has taken up the economic analysis developed under the previous government which highlights the time, cost and productivity benefits of the greater use of digital methods of, in this case, executing statutory declarations. But it's not just the economic analysis which this government has taken from the previous coalition government. The technological and regulatory foundations for digital verification were all put in place by the coalition government. In order to expand digital verification, the government will need to be satisfied that the digital identity service is an accredited entity under the Trusted Digital Identity Framework, the TDIF. The only approved online platform referenced in the explanatory memorandum to this bill is myGovID. Both the Trusted Digital Identity Framework and myGovID are the product of a sustained reform process carried out by the previous coalition government. We funded it, designed it and delivered it in our term in office. So this bill in many ways is a vote of confidence in the system that the previous coalition government put in place to secure Australia's digital future.

But, having made that statement at a level of principle, it's important to look at some of the details. In clause 13 of the explanatory memorandum, it states that only online platforms and identity providers which operate within the Australian government digital ID system will be able to offer digital verification. In other words, private sector or third party involvement in digital verification will not be happening for the foreseeable future.

This is a good encapsulation of the current state of digital identity policy and implementation work under the Albanese Labor government. Frankly, it is in the doldrums. That is highly regrettable for several reasons. The first reason is that, if we had a fully functioning digital identity system with Australians able to build a relationship with their chosen trusted digital identity provider, the way that an Australian would typically go about establishing an account with a bank, telco or insurance company would be through authorising the release of a digital token from their trusted digital identity provider to the bank or the telco. So if you are opening a new service, such as establishing a new phone service with Optus or establishing a private health insurance service with Medibank Private, the process you would go through as a new customer would be to authorise a token to go from your trusted digital identity provider. That would allow Optus, Medibank Private or whichever company it was to be satisfied that this new customer was the person who he or she said that he or she was. It would provide the necessary identity details. The consequence of that would be that, in establishing new relationships with customers, businesses would not be building up extensive copies of the identity documents of those individuals and maintaining extensive records of all of those features of an individual's identity. In turn, that would greatly reduce the risk to Australians of their personal details being the subject of a hack, a cyberbreach, of the kind that sadly we saw impacting on customers of Optus, Medibank Private, Latitude Financial and many other companies and organisations over recent years.

One of the strong reasons why it makes sense to proceed as quickly as possible with digital identity is that, in a systematic way, it will help reduce the risk to Australians of cybersecurity breaches against private sector companies because, even if there is a breach, that company is much less likely to have a honey pot of personal data of individual Australians.

The second reason why it's deeply regrettable that progress on a national digital identity system is in the doldrums under this Albanese Labor government is because there is a very clear linkage between digital identity and improvements in productivity. And if there's one thing we know it's that under this Albanese Labor government Australia's productivity is dropping like a stone. We need to be improving productivity, and productivity is going backwards. There is a measure open to this government to proceed with alacrity establishing a national digital identity system and this government is drifting.

The recent five-year Productivity Commission report had an entire volume devoted to Australia's data and digital dividend. The commission rightly urged the government to get moving on digital identity. The myGov user audit, which I've already referenced, was similarly compelling in making the economic case for expanding and enhancing digital identity. It called on the government to urgently progress legislation.

Given the safety benefits, given the economic and productivity benefits of a national digital identity system, it is perplexing why the Albanese Labor government has not made this a priority. Instead, after some 15 months of government, there is a lack of commitment and a sense of drift. This was well captured in comments made recently at a public forum by finance minister Katy Gallagher, who refused to give a firm commitment on a legislative timetable, saying instead the government was looking to have legislation in place by mid next year, but going on to say that she didn't want to be held to that timetable.

It is hard to draw any other conclusion but that this government is happy to sit on its hands, even at a time when Australians are exposed to the risk of their data falling into the hands of criminals and hostile state actors engaging in the widespread cybersecurity breaches that we know Australian businesses are facing. This lack of action from the Albanese Labor government stands in very sharp contrast to the focus and progress demonstrated by the previous coalition government.

We established the Data and Digital Ministers Meeting, the peak cross-jurisdictional ministerial forum to drive actions on key issues such as credentials, recognising that some credentials are issued by state governments, such as driver licences, while others are issued by the Commonwealth government, such as passports. We invested over $600 million in creating the Trusted Digital Identity Framework and creating myGovID and other components of what is now the Australian government Digital Identity service. We conducted extensive formal consultation with a very wide range of stakeholders and, in late 2021, we released an exposure draft of the Trusted Digital Identity Bill. So the previous government has done so much work here. The current government simply need to take this forward. Sadly, they seem to be consistently missing the opportunity.

It is a consequence of a number of factors. It's deeply regrettable that under this government there is no minister for the digital economy and there is no digital economy strategy, and it similarly seems to be the case that no one minister shows any energy or enthusiasm for stepping forward and taking ownership of digital identity. It was revealed last month, for example, that responsibility for identity and biometrics policy has been transferred from Home Affairs to the Attorney-General's Department. It's entirely unclear how those responsibilities align with the work of the Department of Finance, which is apparently still leading work on digital identity.

The Digital Transformation Agency, which under us sat within Prime Minister and Cabinet, has now been nobbled. It has been put deep into the bowels of the Department of Finance. It's a very long way away from being the whole-of-government digital coordinator and driver that it was intended to be. And the consequences of the malaise when it comes to digital identity policy, the consequences of the drift, the consequences of the lack of focus, the consequences of the lack of energy, of buy-in, of commitment are very clear when it comes to the bill before the House this afternoon.

One of the consequences specifically is that, because this government has not yet legislated a national digital identity system, those Australians who do choose to verify their statutory declaration digitally—and I encourage people to do that; it will save you time and effort, and time of course is money—will do so without the full set of protections and safeguards that might otherwise have been provided, had a full legislative framework been put in place. For example, this bill does not contain some of the digital-identity-specific protections that were contained in the Trusted Digital Identity Bill exposure draft issued by the previous coalition government. Instead, this bill principally relies on provisions in the Privacy Act.

Again, to be clear, this bill is a positive development. The opposition is pleased to see digital identity being used this way, helping to make everyday business being done by Australians will easier, quicker and more convenient. But what this bill also highlights is the big policy opportunity this government is missing. This government should be working as quickly as possible to establish more cases for digital identity use for Australians to further build confidence and trust. And that trust is critical to create the network effect that will help spur greater private sector interest and participation in digital identity, in turn generating more competition and more innovation in a digital identity system.

If you want to look at an example of a digital identity system that is underpinning efficiency, economic growth and indeed savings in public money, look at the Aadhaar national digital identity system in India. I've had the chance twice this year to visit India to learn about Aadhaar, to meet with public officials involved in its development and to meet with businesses which are developing service offerings based upon the Aadhaar platform. Over 1.3 billion Indians now hold a digital identity, which has made it quicker and easier to open bank accounts, to transfer money from one person to another and to receive government benefits. And, when you speak to Indian government officials, they make the point that, while Aadhaar has improved outcomes for citizens, it has also saved Indian taxpayers money by reducing fraudulent claims for social services benefits. Indeed, they cite savings that are some 10 times the cost incurred in developing the system. In public policy you don't very often get a payback like that.

So I do again urge this government to get out of the slow lane when it comes to the national digital identity system. There was an enormous amount of work done by the previous coalition government. Take that work and run with it, rather than drifting.

I conclude by observing that I've used these remarks to put this bill into its proper context by identifying the very significant work streams carried out under the previous government, on which this bill draws extensively. I've pointed out that the digital transformation agenda under this government is somewhere between anaemic and non-existent, and I've canvassed the lamentable progress—or lack of progress—demonstrated by this government on the task of legislating and implementing a national digital identity system and the fact that that makes this bill less of a positive development than it could have been. It is a positive development; again I underline that point. But it could have been better. These issues are formally acknowledged in the second reading amendment that I now move:

That all words after "That" be omitted with a view to substituting the following words:

"whilst not declining to give the bill a second reading, the House notes that:

(1) the electronic execution of a Commonwealth statutory declaration was first implemented under the former government;

(2) digital verification relies on MyGovID and the Trusted Digital Identity Framework, both of which were created by the former government;

(3) the government is yet to formally respond to the MyGov User Audit; and

(4) the government is yet to establish a legislated national digital identity system".

I started this debate by reminding this House of the benefits that can flow when digital transformation is done properly. It can make life simpler and safer for Australians when interacting with government, with business and with each other, and it can create a substantial economic prize through better productivity, more growth and new opportunities. This bill before the House makes some contributions towards those objectives. It is sensible, and the opposition supports it. But there is a much bigger prize, and I urge the government to keep its eye on that big prize and do the work that needs to be done.

Ian Goodenough (Moore, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is the amendment seconded?

Andrew Hastie (Canning, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Defence) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Yes.

Debate adjourned.