Bridget McKenzie (Victoria, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I, too, rise this morning to make my contribution to the debate on the Privacy Amendment (Privacy Alerts) Bill 2014. This bill deals with the very real issue of data security and citizens' relationship to that. It deals with how we protect the privacy of the individual in the internet age.

Predominantly, we are looking at data mining, for instance, being a quite a profitable business. The University of Newcastle has done a bit of work in this area. The data mined can be collected, traded, analysed et cetera to ascertain a lot of detailed information about the individual: their preferences, what they like to eat, what they like to purchase, what they like to do with their leisure time and even how they think. Putting all that data together can allow the state, businesses, other individuals, security agencies—a whole raft of individuals and organisations—to understand the individual in a new way that is very different from before.

I think it raises some serious questions for us as a government as to how we ensure that the privacy of the individual is maintained within this environment, as more and more individuals use social media and the internet for a wider and wider variety of purposes, disclosing more and more about their private lives. There used to be a very clear distinction between your public life, which government is allowed to have a role in, and, from my perspective, your private life, which government is not allowed to have a role in. That line is becoming increasingly blurred through the increasingly pervasive—though often useful—role which the internet plays in our everyday lives. So this bill before us looks at that. Also, the University of Newcastle says it is not just the information itself—because obviously there are technological ways in which we can protect identity—but also the patterns that are useful to purchasers. The patterns gleaned from databases can lead to identification of an individual. That is how sophisticated we have become. So it is not just the individual markers themselves but the patterns within the databases that can cause issues.

When we look at how businesses use databases, we like to consider what the Bank of America did during Davos. They watched social media and looked at what was trending on Twitter in order to promote the bank's brand among people interested in economic issues by publishing real-time content related to the conference. So the bank itself was using social media and data to reach those individuals with highly sophisticated messages. To quote the senior vice president of the bank:

The data comes into the room from many sources, and you have to use that data like a modern-day orchestra leader, blending the inputs in real time in a combination that is as much an art as a science …

So the sophistication is growing, and we are concerned to ensure that the privacy of the individual is maintained.

I share the concerns aired in Bruce Nolop's blog under the heading, 'Why I hate what big data means for privacy'. He says:

… I fear potential abuses by law enforcement and national-security surveillance programs, and find the threat of cyberattacks, a la the Target experience, to be disconcerting. As citizens and consumers, we should demand safeguards against these risks, but recognize that breaches will be inevitable.

…   …   …

I hate the fact that if I use a search engine to research a topic, my screen space becomes inundated with advertisements for related products or services.

So it is a problem. That problem is growing and it is one that I think all of us involved in this space are concerned about.

But what concerns me about the bill before us today is that this is a huge issue. It is an international issue. Yet, in typical Labor Party fashion, when a bill very similar to this one came before the 43rd Parliament, only two days were given for public comment. It opened on the 18th and closed on the 20th. When we look at the scope of the issue itself, this is an issue that other governments internationally are dealing with and grappling with. We had two days to get our heads around the issue itself and potential solutions and to decide whether a bill very similar to the bill before us was actually going to deal with those issues and was going to result in an outcome that did protect the citizens of Australia in a way that did not impinge or overregulate an environment.

But, you know, that is the Labor way. Putting the bill before us today is, quite simply, an attempt by Labor to keep pushing through their failed legislative agenda even though they are now in opposition—a fact that they are finding very difficult to come to terms with. We had six years to deal with this issue. Even though it passed the House of Representatives on 6 June 2013, prior to the last election, they could not find a way to get it onto the Senate agenda paper so that we could actually deal with it. That was the priority that the government held this piece of legislation in. It is simply evidence again of their denial of the outcome of the last election and refusal to visit the reasons for that—the reasons for the policy vacuum that they are now operating in where we have to just dig up the legislation that did not quite make it the last time.

So here, on a Thursday in the Senate, when we have time to reflect on opposition legislation, they have a chance to put up some bills that they are really keen on and that they want to take forward to address a real concern in the community, and they bring forward legislation that is like the Thursday thought bubble: 'Whoops! We've failed to deliver any significant policy again. Let's just dig out of the bucket beside our drawer.' They rustle around. 'What have we got here? What didn't we get through in six years? Man, the pile is enormous!' The pile of unlegislated issues from the previous government is enormous—so enormous that we, in fact, are having to put forward legislation to ensure that promises made in budgets two years ago are able to be enacted, because you failed to get the bread-and-butter stuff right. You could not even get the bread-and-butter stuff right.

Senator Macdonald mentioned previously that we must ask, if this bill is so important, why it did not get treated as a priority while Labor was in government. It is a pity Senator Macdonald is not quite here, but I am sure he is watching with keen intent, and I just would like to ask: while Labor was prioritising their leadership coups, they managed to prioritise misogynistic rants about blue ties, they managed to prioritise—and I am glad Senator Cameron is here—the failed media laws, they managed to prioritise a whole tranche of legislation that the Australian people were not interested in and that the Australian people did not want to see enacted. The Australian people voted you out because you kept pursuing a legislative agenda that was not in their best interests. You managed to prioritise that, and yet you could not prioritise something which, from all accounts—globally and, indeed, locally—is an issue that we must grapple with: how do we appropriately regulate the issue of big data?

Instead, the Rudd-Gillard government's six years of chaos, waste and mismanagement delivered higher taxes, record boat arrivals and debt and deficit as far as the eye could see. Labor inherited a $20 billion surplus and left behind a projected $30 billion deficit. It turned $50 billion in the bank into a projected net debt of well over $200 billion. It was the fastest deterioration in debt in dollar terms as a share of GDP in modern Australian history.