Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

For those who are not aware of what this relates to, Mr Malcolm Turnbull recently introduced a bill for a mandatory data retention proposal which would force telecommunications providers—many of them very unwillingly, I should say—to warehouse huge volumes of private data effectively belonging to all of us, from young children to High Court judges to diplomats to ordinary Australians right across the country. Every man, woman and child, every device in the country, and that is going to be extremely costly. It amounts to little more than a surveillance tax—one that was not announced before the election. Industry presumably will pass on some of these costs to users, and the rest will be picked up by taxpayers. The PwC report has been commissioned to find out how much it will cost. I think it is imperative that the government puts that report into the public domain so that we know what the cost will be.