Barry O'Sullivan (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I too rise to make a contribution to the Migration Amendment (Strengthening Biometrics Integrity) Bill 2015. I would like to open with an anecdotal story that brings the impacts home to us in the parliament. You are aware that in the confines of Parliament House all of the staff who deal with senators and members on a day-to-day basis have a professional obligation to be able to identify each of us. Each of us has occasion to move around and move freely through the building. It is a security measure and a courtesy measure. Recently, there was an episode here that involved one of our fellow senators, Senator Joe Bullock. I personally think that Joe Bullock is a very handsome man. He has a fine stack of grey hair. He has got very gentle jowls and presents himself in a very distinguished manner. Yet when he recently appeared before estimates—here he is, a reflection, might I say, of myself!—one of the professional staff put my nameplate in front of Senator Bullock. So if that can occur here within Parliament House, where every effort is made to meet the very high standards of security, imagine the difficulties we have with those professional staff who manage our borders, who are involved in law enforcement matters and who deal with, as has been stated before, almost 50 million border crossings each year.

All of us have probably travelled internationally. Many of us find ourselves at airports at all odd hours of the day, where we join with hundreds and hundreds of others. And if you have had a flight that has clashed with another international flight you could have been there with 500 or 600 people, all trying to be processed at a border point. And when you have regard to the number of border points in Australia, where there could be 500 or 600 people being processed at any one time, it starts to build a picture of the challenge involved for those who are charged with the responsibility of the security of our borders of processing those people coming into our country.

Might I say that the roles of the people who provide security are many and varied. Some of the roles they play are a 'there and now' role where they are checking, for example, for drugs or for other forms of contraband. Indeed, we find circumstances where we have very thorough measures in place to see that people do not bring an apple into our country from overseas for fear that there is a worm in the heart of the fruit. So I think measures such as these are necessary so that we can start to isolate high-risk individuals who might want to cross our borders with a worm in their hearts.

To do that we have to bring about measures for our law enforcement and border security agencies, to enable them to do the job with some efficiency. In a former life and in fact in a number of former professions I had considerable experience in dealing with many people—in fact, I am tempted to say hundreds of people—who, over time, made efforts to convince me or my colleagues that they were someone other than who they really were. When we talk about the typical non-biometric measures upon which an individual can be identified, can I go back to training as early as the mid-seventies. I have previously told the story in this place of having to ring a bank, to make arrangements on behalf of my aged mother and of the pain and suffering that I had to go through to be able to convince that bank that indeed I had the power to make an adjustment to my late mother's accounts in her interests, at a time when she was in a nursing home. Yet there are people who can cross our borders, who can make their way through the security provided with less effort than that.

We come back to the point where the traditional method of identifying someone was to find something on their person or in their possession or presented by them that would assist in identifying them—for example, a drivers licence, often with their photo attached. Indeed, on many occasions what I might refer to as a legitimate drivers licence, fraudulently obtained, was presented. That is to say it was a drivers licence, issued by the relevant authority, and in every respect the drivers licence was indeed what it presented as being. Indeed, the face on the drivers licence identified the individual in possession of that document. However, upon examination it was found that the drivers licence was obtained illegally in that much of the information that had been provided on the drivers licence, in particular the identity of that particular individual, was false as a result of fraudulent representations or indeed fraudulent efforts on the part of that particular individual.

The use of photographic evidence is in and of itself unreliable on some occasions. Photographs can be very readily manipulated these days. In fact, a newspaper photographer took a dastardly shot of me recently and, with consent, some work was done on it. And when I appeared in the Sunday paper I even looked finer than Joe Bullock, which takes some real effort on the part of the people who have these skills! I have a daughter who is a desktop publisher and is involved in this work. I have seen some of the work that she has done in manipulating photographs for magazines and annual reports. It is quite remarkable to the point where, when they press the print button and produce a photograph, it in itself becomes an original document. It is not as though you can look at that photograph or piece of paper where that image is being printed and through an examination determine that the image has been manipulated, unless of course it has been a job that has been done poorly.

The other is documents. People will produce documents in their possession that look as if they are legitimate and, indeed, they may well be in the sense that their genesis may well have been prepared by some individual who has the honest but mistaken belief that the person in front of them, who is providing that information, is who they say they are. The information embedded therein can have a powerful impact upon people and security positions.

You have all heard of the examples but we have one in my home state of Queensland where a member of parliament provided an individual with a reference. It was a glowing reference and that glowing reference was used by that individual to achieve certain outcomes. But when that reference was eventually put to the test, of course it failed to live up to some of the statements that had been made in the reference document itself. Now the member of parliament would have us believe that in this case that he was satisfied with the information provided to him, partially by the recipient of the reference and partially by some—I would say poor—research conducted by his staff. So here is another example where if someone was presented with a driver's licence that had a name and details on it with a photograph—and clearly this was the individual—and then they were presented with a reference from a current member of parliament, depending on the circumstances, many tens of thousands of people in security positions around this country would, in effect I think, be satisfied with those sorts of credentials.

Additionally, if an individual were to produce a bank card or two, a letter from their grandmother addressed to them and a short note from a neighbour, all of these things would build the credentials of the individual making the presentation and that would, in turn, persuade some people in security positions to accept those things as having sufficient weight in an aggregate form to allow people to pass through a security point. There have been hundreds of thousands of cases reported over time where people have used either false documents, forged documents or documents that obtain false information to be able to produce an outcome of interest to them. And this is why biometrics become such a valuable tool when you are trying to determine the identity of an individual with absolute certainty.

There are hundreds of thousands of serological samples, bodily fluids, hair, all sorts of bits and pieces that are kept in this country every year as a result of investigations that have been conducted. So normal everyday Australian citizens who find themselves in difficult circumstances either by their own making or under suspicion find that samples are taken and are recorded. In fact, we have entire agencies in this country that have quite literally millions of finger prints online.

So Australian citizens, every one of us no matter what we are doing, while going about our normal everyday business, can find ourselves in circumstances where any number of law enforcement agencies or their officers have the power to take biometrics from us and to test them against the biometrics that are already on record in this country. For example, you and I might find ourselves walking along a street in Sydney where an event has occurred and some officer has a reasonable but mistaken belief that we may be persons of interest. As the law provides in this country, we could be totally innocent—it could be you and I, Joe, mistaken as twins coming away from a birthday party—but they can take our fingerprints and other samples and run them through the system to see that we are not the pair that recently left the scene of a burglary.

These measures have been around for a long time. They are not very effective because, Joe, you and I are still free. But the fact of the matter is they are used on ordinary Australians. We go about our daily business having no real adverse regard to this. This is what keeps our nation safe. Yet there would be some who might resist the idea that if we have particular select group of individuals, a cohort of individuals coming from a high-risk source into our country, we will make sure that they do not have typhoid. We will put them through a scanner that takes their temperature—I came through one the other day—we will make sure that we take every measure to take the apple because it might infect our apple industry, and we will run a sniffer dog along. There may be measures that are available to us that will allow us to lift the standard of our security on those individuals yet we have some people who are yet to be convinced to support these measures.

I have always said that I do not fear ever having my fingerprints taken on any occasion. I used to say this to young crooks that I was involved with—mind you as a police officer, not socially—and they would resist having their fingerprints taken. Prima facie, that would suggest to me that they were trying to conceal something. And the same should be said of those people coming across our borders. If they are concerned about having their biometrics taken that will lift the standard of identifying them to be who they are then you have to ask the question: why? In the modern age, these people, I promise you, spend more time thinking about how to avoid, how to get around, how to get over, how to get under our security measures than any one of us does on a normal day about how we might put them in place.

Biometrics are going to give our professional staff on our borders, those who are charged with the responsibility to keep this nation safe, some additional tools. And they are tools that anybody coming to our country who seeks either refuge in our country, who wants to visit our country or indeed who wants to come here and make their life, they should not fear—in fact they should support the primary ideal—that we as a nation are entitled to know who they are before they enter our nation. Some of these biometric measures that are proposed in this bill are simply going to enhance our chances to do that in an effective and efficient way.

Might I say that, if you are not convinced in relation to the potential of someone who has gone overseas and engaged in activities that are against the interests of this nation, you should consider the issue of the trafficking of children. A child changes over time, so identifying the child at an interval of greater than two years from an old photograph becomes very difficult. For those of you who are not convinced, in the next sittings I will bring you some photographs of me when I was a dashing young man of 17 or 18 years, and you will understand that there is nothing today that reflects the images that are captured in those photos of some 30 years ago. So biometrics are the only sure way that we can record the identity of these people. They allow us, our security staff and those charged with this responsibility every possible chance that they can get to do their job and do their job efficiently.

We have done this at a domestic level. Our police officers now have facilities, many of them in patrol cars, that will allow them to take the biometrics of an individual and get an immediate answer back that helps them identify who the individual is. We collect massive amounts of data. I would not know, and nor would you, how many times we have been driving along and an unmarked police vehicle that we would not identify will have punched into systems within the vehicle information that will allow them to identify possibly who we are but, more importantly, who the owner of the vehicle is, whether the vehicle is currently registered, the address of the owner and other details. Through some other information, they may form the view that the vehicle was being driven by us. Indeed, there are so many ways that they can immediately access data in relation to us to identify who we are. This is the modern world. They can search and go onto our Facebook page, and, if they are satisfied that that is us in the Facebook page, in a matter of 10 or 15 minutes, I am told by my previous police colleagues, they can build an entire picture on someone while they are driving along following a particular vehicle. They can form a view as to who they are, their age and their identity. In fact, once they start to penetrate some of the other data that is available, some of it on the public record, they can build an entire picture of your family, the circumstances of your life and where you may be going. If you are travelling in a particular direction, from the data they have they can work out exactly where you might be going. (Time expired)