Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Patrick asked a very similar question to the one I was going to ask. Minister, because you are the foreign minister—and a captive audience at the moment, I might add—it gives me the opportunity to urge you to engage with your counterparts in the US and seek a diplomatic assurance from the US government that there will be no attempts to access the COVIDSafe data under the US CLOUD Act. I will simply leave that with you. I'm not able to do that. You are, and I think that would be helpful if those diplomatic assurances could be sought.

You gave a number of answers—which were appreciated—in your previous contributions. Just to follow up on the data management protocols that we were discussing earlier, why was it decided that this legislation would not create an offence in regard to state and territory health authorities accessing data outside the parameters that you discussed earlier? There is no doubt—and I acknowledged this in my speech on the second reading—that the privacy parameters around this data enshrined in this act are significantly more robust than those associated with other information on citizens that the government and corporations collect. But it does seem to me that you're relying on agreements between the Commonwealth and state and territory authorities rather than legislating to make sure that state and Commonwealth authorities treat this data with respect.