Senate debates

Tuesday, 14 May 2024

Statements by Senators

Personal Information and Privacy

1:52 pm

Photo of Malcolm RobertsMalcolm Roberts (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | | Hansard source

Last weekend across every capital city, as well as in Cairns and Mackay in my home state of Queensland, thousands of Australians came out to protest this Labor government's Digital ID Bill and the evil agenda behind it. Everyday Australians recognise that this bill is an attack on their freedom, privacy and way of life. The Brisbane rally in King George Square, in the heart of the Greens electorate of Brisbane, drew more than a thousand everyday Australians. The crowd displayed a level of awareness of national and international issues that must be making those who mock One Nation nervous. The public are waking up to the plan that successive Liberal and Labor governments have had and are implementing to use Australia as a crash test dummy for the crony communist seizure of the wealth and human rights of everyday Australians, the purpose of which is to transfer even more wealth into the hands of the world's predatory billionaires by using the Online Safety Act, the Identity Verification Services Act, the Digital ID Bill and the misinformation and disinformation bill to identify, apprehend, punish and imprison anyone who resists this slide back into feudalism and serfdom.

Free speech defends every other human right. The witnesses to the Digital ID Bill inquiry, including the Human Rights Commission, drew attention to the lack of privacy and human rights protections in the bill. The committee ignored the evidence before them and returned a glowing recommendation to pass the bill in a report likely authored in the bowels of Geneva or New York, with almost identical legislation appearing in other Western wealthy nations at the same time. Then the bill passed through the Senate, with the debate guillotined—not one word of debate to air Australia's views on this hideous, far-reaching bill. One Nation has a petition to immediately repeal this evil bill. So far 70,000 Australians have signed it.

The Albanese government now need to do something that they have so far refused to do—listen to the public, to the people. Repeal the Digital ID Bill or take the whole serfdom agenda to an election and ask the Australian people: is this the future you want?