David Fawcett (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I also rise to make some brief remarks about this private member's bill put forward by Senator Singh. I would like to start by acknowledging that the whole issue of information, whether it be private information, information about companies, how we collect and how we store that information and, most importantly, how we secure that information, is quite important. It is of immense value to individuals, it is of immense value to companies and it is of immense value to countries. You only have to look at some of the things that have been occurring around the world recently, such as data retention and data security, to see why it is so valuable.

On the international stage, in May this year, we saw an indictment by a US grand jury that has caused new tensions between Beijing and Washington around accusations that there were PLA personnel who had stolen some billions of dollars worth of corporate secrets from America as well as some 700,000 pages of personal emails and other classified or private information from the US. Eric Holder, a US Attorney-General, made some quite pointed remarks about the nature of this kind of espionage, this kind of theft of information. What it points out and really highlights is that, regardless of whether the information is private, commercial or of national interest, the ability to collect and store, and the controlled release of that information, is really quite important.

The same discussion around that US case with the indictment looked at things in Australia where we have overseas companies seeking to acquire Australian resource companies. There is quite a deal of discussion about the impact of either the deliberate seeking-out of that data through hacking, or inadvertent leaks, or breaches of data privacy, as it affects the commercial transactions and as it affects people's ability to influence commercial outcomes through knowing personal data.

We saw also in Australia, in May this year, that the Australian Privacy Commissioner is investigating the superannuation company, Cbus, for a second time, about the leak of workers' personal details. In that case a senior employee of Cbus leaked personal information of around 300 employees of a company that was subject to a construction union industrial campaign. That employee happened also to be the honorary president of the Queensland branch of the CFMEU. What the Cbus files revealed was that the internal inquiry found that this person had inappropriately sent personal details of more than 300 workers to a third party without consent. The company has subsequently said that he has to undergo some remedial training. But the issue here is that the workers were employed by a company, Lis-Con, and the allegation is that they wanted that information to help and industrial campaign against the company. What we see is that this issue around data privacy is important.