Natasha Stott Despoja (SA, Australian Democrats) Share this | Hansard source

The incorporated speech read as follows—

I would like to speak on the Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2006-2007 and the Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2006-2007. As always, these appropriation bills contain a raft of additional funding measures to be paid from the Consolidated Revenue Fund. While we will be supporting these bills, I will use this opportunity to briefly speak on some of the activities for which these bills are allocating money.

The Department of Human Services will be receiving $36.7 million under Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2006-2007 and $34.4 million under Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2006-2007 for the Access Card project.

The Government is yet to convince the Australian public on the necessity of having a ‘smart card’ to combat identity fraud and enhance service delivery. The Access Card project is proving a hard sell for the Australian Government so it comes as no surprise to see the Government grant it additional funding.

In last year’s Budget, the project was allocated $1.1 billion over the next four years for the establishment and implementation of the Card. The measure also included funding of $47.3 million over four years for a communications strategy to ensure that all Australians are aware of the process for registering for the Card. So a hefty entitlement, a huge allocation of money is required in order to implement this Access Card, as it is being referred to, but which I prefer to call a national identity card, because it is an ID card by stealth; it is a de facto ID card.

I am also quite happy to refer to this card as the promissory card. I think this is an apt name for a card that promises to be all things to everyone but is destined to fail on all accounts.

From its inception, the card promised to assist in the fight against terrorism. That rhetoric has since stopped in the face of a lack of evidence to suggest that identity cards can be used as a means of preventing terrorism. Leading London-based human rights group Privacy International, in its interim report Mistaken Identity; Exploring the Relationship between National Identity Cards & the Prevention of Terrorism dated April 2004, found:

While a link between identity cards and anti-terrorism is frequently suggested, the connection appears to be largely intuitive. Almost no empirical research has been undertaken to clearly establish how identity tokens can be used as a means of preventing terrorism. ¹

The Government has also promised that there will be a range of fraud savings, $1.6 billion to $3 billion, over 10 years. Centrelink and Medicare estimate fraud and leakage in their respective organisations at around $1.4 billion to $2 billion annually. The smart card system is touted as delivering up-front savings of between $400 million and $800 million, principally consisting of reductions in identity-related fraud, abuse of concessions in Medicare and payment cancellations by Centrelink. Once fully operational the annual savings are estimated at between $125 million and $250 million.

The major problem with the Government figures in relation to the Access Card is that no one knows how they were arrived at. We know that there has been a report done by KPMG. The Government has released this report but in an edited format. Important costings have been held back on the account of them being commercially sensitive in the context of Government tendering for the smart card project. Well on March 16th the Government tender process closed and the Government is evaluating the bids. How long is this evaluation process to continue? Is this just a stalling tactic in order to deny the release of these figures?

I reiterate my calls to the Government to make available to Members of Parliament the full version of the KPMG report, not an edited version, and to do so with alacrity. Alternatively, give us new up-to-date costings. This request for further funding clearly indicates that the smart card plan the former Human Services Minister, the Hon. Joe Hockey MP, took to Cabinet is not the one the Australian public are being asked to consider, nor is it the one for which KPMG wrote a business case. Does the Government really have an idea how much this project is going to cost?

There is also a great deal of uncertainty in relation to how much identity fraud there is in the Australian community that can be directly attributed to welfare and social services fraud. The estimate of the cost and cost-savings for the taxpayer in relation to identity fraud remains unclear. Mr Jordan of KPMG in a recent Senate inquiry into the Access card estimated from Centrelink and Medicare alone the overall potential fraud and leakage in the system was $1.4 to $2 billion annually. This figure must be approached with caution. For example, it appears leakage might also relate to entitlement-based fraud and over-servicing. KPMG have also not said how much identity fraud is used to perpetuate welfare fraud as opposed to the other types of identity fraud such as obtaining an identity card for the purposes of under-age drinking, tax evasion or credit-card.

The Access card project is the biggest IT project ever to be contemplated by an Australian Government, and as Gartner Asia-Pacific research vice-president Richard Harris commented: “Cost blow-outs and deadline problems are a fact of life for even the best-planned IT projects.” As S2 Intelligence research principal Bruce McCabe commented “What are the chances of it finishing on time and on budget? Virtually nil, if you look at the experience of other large projects.” ²

There are several worrying features of this promissory card. The feature of most concern to the Australian public is the inclusion of a high-definition biometric photograph on the surface of millions of cards. The Government promises that the card will not become a universal form of identification. If the Government is telling the truth then I call on the Government to act now and end ordinary Australians suspicion that the smart card project is merely a platform for a national ID card by removing plans to include a photograph.

The Prime Minister has denied that the Access Card is “a Trojan Horse for an ID card”, but he will not rule out adding more functions to the smart card later. I am deeply concerned about function creep with this promissory card. It seems additional functions and features are being contemplated. At what cost, I ask? For the billion-dollar ball-park cost that has been announced, it’s difficult to know what the Australian public will get.

The prospect of having a consumer space as well as a Government space on the smart card chip has alarmed many in the community. Health professionals are concerned that sensitive health information, reserved for patient files, will now be in the public domain. Trusted and much loved health service providers like Medic Alert fear being legislated out of existence. In a meeting with my office the Chief Executive Officer advised that the misinformation and mistrust of the voluntary section of the smart card was already affecting their existing and potential client base. The Victorian Privacy Commissioner in her latest submission to the Fels Taskforce on its Discussion paper No 2 voluntary and medical information has stated blankly “no customer controlled area in the chip at all”. She also sums up the general mood about this customer controlled area in the chip in her following statement:

The chip will not only contain information said to be relevant for access to Commonwealth benefits and concessions; the bill creates a so-called customer-controlled part of the chip. As yet the size of this is unknown. What information could be put on this part of the chip is also unknown, save that the bill, in section 40, allows the cardholder to use the card for any lawful purpose. Apparently Queensland is already interested in it containing driver’s licence information. Other states and territories may follow.

Sections of the private sector such as banks are no doubt keenly interested. The consumer and privacy task force has just issued a discussion paper that flags that information such as allergies, drug alerts, chronic illness, donor status and next of kin may be included. The more information and the wider the diversity of the information that is to be included, the greater the security risks, especially, as has been suggested, if the customer has access to the information on the customer part of the chip and is able to update it or alter it from the internet-enabled home computer. Although the bill stipulates that the card cannot be required to be produced for purposes other than the purposes of the bill, if information such as driver’s licence information is included then mandatory production widens. It is also easy to predict that those that want to populate the customer part of a card will be able to coerce consent through such methods as significant financial incentives. ³

All around there are rumblings in the community that this promissory card is promising too much. I call on the Government to limit the scope of its smart card project now while it has the chance. This card should be about facilitating access to health and social services and the Government should desist immediately from calling it anything else. It should not be designed as a convenient form of identity or proof-of-age card, nor should it be designed as a convenient storage device for emergency and medical information, that will necessarily be sensitive and likely be viewed by any person with access to a card reader. The Government should not continue to ignore genuine concern across industry and the community that if the original and more narrow identification purpose is expanded, this may result in a extra cost and higher privacy and security risks.

Under these bills, I note that there is almost $12 million additional funding for the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO), though I am not surprised that the Government does not trumpet that expenditure in their second reading speech in this election year! We are, therefore, a little in the dark about what this expenditure is specifically for, even though it is one of the more significant funding appropriations in the bill. I do note though that approximately $1.6 million of that amount is for the removal of spent nuclear fuel from the ANSTO site – why has this cost more than expected?

We have seen ample evidence this year of this Government’s intention to establish a nuclear power industry in Australia. I have respect for Dr Ziggy Switkowski but I think it is not a good look that the Government would appoint him Chair of the Uranium Mining, Processing and Nuclear Energy Review and then appoint him Chair of the ANSTO Board almost immediately after the Government got the answer we suspect they were always hoping for from the Review.

We have experts from Australia and elsewhere around the world clamouring for immediate action to address climate change, and the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change gives us 10 to 20 years to act before global warming has an irreparable impact on our environment ⁴ , and this Government seems to believe that nuclear energy is the answer.

I have serious doubts about an energy technology being portrayed by the Government as a solution for our climate woes when the Government’s own nuclear energy review estimates that it would be 15 years before nuclear energy could be delivered to the grid in Australia ⁵ . And where does the Government expect to find the skilled technicians and scientists to run this industry when we are already facing skills shortages in other areas of science and engineering that we do actually have a strong history in?

Perhaps though I can finish by highlighting one area where these bills fall down. I notice that there is no new money under the Foreign Affairs and Trade portfolio for AusAID. I have lodged Questions on Notice at the Additional Estimates hearings in February this year relating to our aid budget and the Millenium Development Goals.

The United Nations estimates that aid donations from developed countries of 0.7 per cent of gross national income should be sufficient to meet the Millennium Development Goals. Currently our aid budget is around 0.3 per cent of gross national income, and this when Australia has been enjoying a long period of economic growth and the Government has been wondering what to do with its budget surpluses.

Even the Prime Minister’s announced increase in the aid budget to $4 billion by 2010 will leave us significantly short of the UN’s 0.7 per cent target. We are a wealthy country and we are being put to shame by others around the world that have met the UN target.

I look forward with interest to the Government’s answers to my Estimates questions but have to say that I am disappointed that the Government could not see fit to include some additional appropriations for AusAID.

1     Privacy International, Mistaken Identity, Exploring the Relationship Between National Identity Cards & the Prevention of Terrorism available at http://www.privacyinternational.org/issues/idcardluk/id-terrorism.pdf

2     Australian Privacy Foundation The Federal government calls it: a ‘Human Services Access Card’, ‘SmartCard’ or even a ‘Consumer Card’ We call it for what it is. The proposal for a national ID card system available at: http://www.privacyinternational.org/issues/idcard/uk/id-terrorism.pdf

3     Office of the Victorian Privacy Commissioner, Submission on the Exposure Draft of the Human Services (Enhanced Service Delivery) Bill 2007 (Cth), January 2007, pages 9-10.

4     Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, http://www.hm-treasury. gov.uklmedia/8AC/F7/ExecutiveeSummary.pdf

5     Uranium Mining, Processing and Nuclear Energy—Opportunities for Australia, 2006, Australian Government, pg 2.