With a Digital ID framework established, our data is more important than ever. Why does it seem like the government is willing to hand Australian data centres over to foreign interests?
The government is more interested in serving their donors, who are connected to multinational corporations, than in looking after Australians. Only One Nation will put Australians’ interests first and protect their data.
Transcript
We have to wonder whether this government is capable of stopping any bit of Australia being sold to foreign multinational corporations, or is it all just part of its digital ID plan? We’re going to find out when the Foreign Investment Review Board makes its decision on the $24 billion buyout of Australian-founded data firm AirTrunk. AirTrunk is the largest data centre platform in the entire Asia-Pacific region. A conglomerate of multinational investment firms and foreign pension funds is about to buy it. It wasn’t that long ago the government somehow let China buy a 99-year lease to control the Port of Darwin, Australia’s most northern and strategically vital port. Less than a year ago, the Albanese government decided to keep letting China own the 99-year port lease. Many are still dumbfounded. How could we ever let this happen?
As data becomes as valuable as gold in an increasingly digital world, we may one day look back at the sale of AirTrunk in the same way. Data is fast becoming an essential utility for the entire world. All the opportunities a digital world presents are clear yet the risks of profit-hungry corporations and increasingly tyrannical governments abusing digital identity outnumber the benefits.
In a digital identity world, where privacy protections are paper-thin, sovereign control of our data centres is a matter of economic and national security, and personal security. Unfortunately, except in the most severe and blatant cases, the Foreign Investment Review Board has a track record of not appreciating the importance of Australians owning Australia. We can anticipate that the Foreign Investment Review Board will rubber-stamp this deal, like so many others. The data centres that Australians’ sensitive data passes through and sits in will become foreign-owned. Let’s put Australians first and ban foreign ownership of sensitive companies.
https://img.youtube.com/vi/xviUWc8vRG0/maxresdefault.jpg7201280Senator Malcolm Robertshttps://www.malcolmrobertsqld.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/One-Nation-Logo1-300x150.pngSenator Malcolm Roberts2024-11-04 14:41:162024-11-04 14:41:18Australian’s Data Must be Protected
⚠️ Keep an eye out for this. The information you provide goes back to the LNP (or Labor) campaign office in Brisbane where they take your personal details and then bombard you with calls, letters and emails ahead of the election.
https://img.youtube.com/vi/GnNgTkPvYMo/maxresdefault.jpg7201280Senator Malcolm Robertshttps://www.malcolmrobertsqld.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/One-Nation-Logo1-300x150.pngSenator Malcolm Roberts2024-09-26 17:20:302024-09-26 17:46:30Political Data Harvesting Scam Arriving in Letterboxes Across Queensland
The Treasury Laws Amendment (Consumer Data Right) Bill 2022 has finally come up for a vote after more than a year of efforts by One Nation to push it forward.
This legislation grants everyday Australians the right to know who is accessing their data, to refuse permission for its use, and to request its deletion. The protections in this Bill will make it easier for individuals, class actions and regulators to take legal action against companies that abuse your data under the Digital ID Act. One Nation supports the Bill, believing these protections are long overdue.
However, there are still significant gaps. For example, the Bill lacks provisions for auditing data companies to ensure they are handling data responsibly. As it stands, the Bill depends on whistleblowers to come forward. One Nation remains committed to defending your right to live your life without big brother, intrusive government surveillance.
Transcript
It’s about time the Treasury Laws Amendment (Consumer Data Right) Bill 2022 came up for a vote. I wonder why it is that bills which take away rights, like the Digital ID Bill, are guillotined, debate denied, committee processes rigged to produce the desired outcome and then rushed through the Senate in an eye blink yet bills that give people rights are held back for years. One Nation supports this bill, which should have been passed at the same time as the Digital ID Bill—a piece of legislation that relied on the protections provided in the consumer data rights bill.
This week the Minister for Government Services, Bill Shorten MP, released plans for the government’s own digital ID, which he calls the Trust Exchange. I don’t want to rain on the minister’s parade, yet I’m compelled to state the obvious: the government does not have any trust to trade—although the use of the word ‘trade’ is significant, because it shows the government doesn’t understand what it’s doing. When you use a digital ID, the circumstances of its use are recorded. There is a data trail that holds rich information about the person being verified—about you.
The private intermediary who’s performing the data handling can retain a copy of that data for a specified period. Does anyone really think they will delete that data when the retention period ends? That data is worth billions of dollars on the data market. The Digital ID Bill provided no protection against illegal data retention. The consumer data right bill does provide some protections, and it includes an overarching statement of fairness and honesty that would make prosecution of big data for misbehaviour much easier.
The minister has announced, apparently proudly, that the government will keep on file a record of every digital ID transaction. Imagine being proud of that! Such a record will be triggered multiple times a day: on public transport, at the shops and, as the minister himself said, in the pub. Can you believe it? It will happen when entering public buildings, like this one; when signing contracts; when using an ATM; and, as announced this week, when accessing social media. As I foretold when the Morrison Liberal-National government introduced the Digital ID Bill, and again when the Albanese Labor-Greens government pushed it through the Senate with no debate—no debate at any stage—each of these uses for the digital ID is in active development. I thank the minister for his honesty in admitting that the government will retain each of these transactions in its myGovID master file.
The Trust Exchange QR code, which is to be branded ‘TEx’, is a massive technological undertaking. I do not trust that this government and our bureaucrats have the technical knowledge to pull this off. I have to wonder how Minister Shorten can pursue justice over the tragic robodebt data-matching horror show so aggressively and then turn around and repeat the same mistake with TEx. Mismatches will be the norm; they’ll be normal. Data outages such as we’ve seen in recent months will occur again and again and cause chaos again and again. Yet the government is intent on creating a centralised database of every citizen, accessible from every business in the country through intermediaries who inevitably will be large foreign companies that make their money selling data.
Here’s an example of what could and does go wrong. Do you remember when this Labor government demanded a myGov account was needed to register for a director ID? Remember that, Madam Acting Deputy President? It wasn’t so long ago. The process was outsourced to Accenture, which immediately treated the exercise as a dataharvesting opportunity, a windfall, and started demanding that applicants for a director ID also provide details of their bank accounts, superannuation accounts, Centrelink account, Medicare number, tax return, drivers licence number and passport number. Yet the only thing the enabling legislation allowed for was the tax file number—one thing, and Accenture harvested seven. One word from the government and big business did whatever they liked with the data of millions of Australians.
Accenture committed theft on a fraudulent basis. It was fraud. My office notified the government, and it stopped. There was no punishment, no punishment at all. What happened to that data? Was all that private information destroyed? I’ll bet it wasn’t. In fact, no, it wasn’t. This government actually paid the big data company millions of taxpayer dollars—your money, our money—to harvest data for their own commercial benefit, and they went against the law to do it. So excuse me if I don’t trust this new TEx system. It’s appropriately named, though: TEx will be a digital Wild West where the bad guys, big data, exploit the public for profit and power.
Earlier, when I said this wasn’t a trade, here’s why. For it to be a trade everyday Australians would get something out of it that we, the people, do not currently have. People already have a photo ID. They already have government issued identification sufficient to meet any request. The government does not need to know if a person went to the pub today. Do you know who does? Life, motor vehicle and insurance companies. Do you know who else?
Employers. They would love to know how often, where and what time of the day an employee goes to the pub. This is why the value of the data industry worldwide is expected to be worth trillions in the future. In reality, a bank does not trade in money; it trades in risk. Imagine the money they will make if they can entirely eliminate the risk from their books by knowing everything about their customers—everything all the time! Imagine how the government could use that data. The answer is provided in the UK prime minister Keir Starmer’s behaviour.
Right now he is rounding up people for wrong think and wrong speak. I spoke about that lesson in communism on Tuesday night.
This is the future, your future, under the Albanese Labor government or under the other uniparty wing, the Liberal-Nationals, who introduced the Digital ID Bill and introduced the misinformation and disinformation bill. Trust has been lost. Mr Albanese and his Labor government have lost the people’s trust, lost the people’s confidence, lost the people’s support. After the Morrison government grossly and dishonestly mismanaged COVID-19, Mr Dutton and his Liberal-National opposition have not yet earned people’s trust, confidence and support. We need a strong crossbench of true conservatives to stop Australia’s slide into poor governance. The election cannot come fast enough.
https://img.youtube.com/vi/apbH9q1Jh5A/maxresdefault.jpg7201280Senator Malcolm Robertshttps://www.malcolmrobertsqld.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/One-Nation-Logo1-300x150.pngSenator Malcolm Roberts2024-09-05 15:21:212024-09-05 15:21:26One Nation Pushes New Data Rights Bill to a Vote!
I expressed my disgust at the lack of data and the contradictions in the policy objectives of various legislation the Albanese Labor government is producing.
This parliament stopped making decisions long ago on issues relating to health, the environment and climate based on data. It now actually contradicts the data. Yet no one has the self-awareness to notice let alone care.
Thanks to the Albanese government, we’re now sending millions of dollars to the people of Tuvalu because their sea levels are rising when the data shows that in fact their island is growing in size and the sea levels are not rising. At a time when Australians are doing it hard from the rising cost-of-living, the PM wants to send millions of dollars to the Pacific over fear the people ‘might’ lose their homes based on flawed climate theories with no data. This is costing our country its future. We’re already feeling the pain as a result of this flawed process and it will hurt our grandchildren even more.
We urgently need responsible governance with policies based on real data for the good of all Australians.
Transcript
Senator Hanson has already outlined our party’s response to this, so I won’t go into that. I want to make it very clear that Pacific islanders, in my experience, are wonderful people. They’re very friendly. Fiji is the friendliest country on Earth, so I’m told. We have many Pacific islanders in the south of Brisbane. I’ve come across them in the regions, like when I worked in Kalgoorlie. They’re stars in the NRL. They’re wonderful people. I’ve got no issue with the people of the Pacific islands.
What I have got an issue with are the people in this chamber, not just those who are here now. The people in the Senate are largely responsible for destroying this country. I’m going to talk briefly on how. For five days last week and for a half a day today, we discussed a bill about sea dumping, all based on the stuff that comes out of the south end of a northbound bull. It’s complete rubbish. In COVID, tens of thousands of people died needlessly to something that was supposedly based on the science. It’s now coming out that the injections were not safe and not effective. We were told the science was there. What a lie. We are spending trillions of dollars in forgone income—heaven knows how much our children and grandchildren will spend and how many opportunities they will lose—on climate. I’ll come to that in a minute. There’s not one shred of evidence that has ever been given in this parliament.
We talk about the environment. All kinds of things are done in the name of the environment, without any evidence: the Murray-Darling Basin, no evidence; the Coorong lakes in South Australia at the Murray mouth, no evidence. In fact, these are contradicting the evidence, and everyone here is asleep. This parliament stopped making decisions on data long ago, and now it actually contradicts the data, and no-one is awake enough to even care. Trillions of dollars being spent and contradictions of the actual real-world data characterise decisions made in this parliament, characterise policies made by the major parties in this parliament and characterise legislation. In my previous work as an engineer and as an executive, if we ignored the data, people died—they died—just like they did because of COVID injections. Science is often touted in this chamber as justification for various policies, yet it’s never presented. Science is wonderful. It gave us objectivity. It gave us freedom from the days when, prior to science, the biggest muscle, the strongest financial warrior, the strongest religion prevailed. Then suddenly science emerged and gave us objectivity, and suddenly freedom emerged. Let me tell you briefly what science is. The first thing is that it relies on empirical, scientific data. It’s based on objective data, objective observations. And no-one in this chamber does that on climate, COVID or the environment.
But the data is not enough. When I first came into the chamber, back in 2016, I used that term, ’empirical data’ and all the journalists and some of the politicians scurried off to find out what ’empirical’ means. It means objective, measured data. But that by itself is not enough. It needs to be presented with a logical scientific framework that proves cause and effect. No-one has presented the logical scientific points that show that carbon dioxide from human activity affects climate and needs to be changed. We now have Pacific Islanders supported to come here on that basis. Yet it’s never been done. A third part of science is that it’s backed up with hard references, scientific references—and not just peer reviewed, because peer reviewed can be done by anyone, but actually based upon assessing the papers objectively. They’re the three criteria: empirical scientific data, logical scientific points that prove cause and effect.
With the whole climate scam, the climate fraud, no-one anywhere in the world has pointed out the specific quantified effect of carbon dioxide from human activity on any aspect of climate: not temperatures, not snowfall, not droughts, not storm frequency or severity or duration—nothing. There’s not one shred of basis for policy, because that is the basis for policy. There’s not one shred of evidence. I’ve even heard a list of scientists who are afraid of the climate—but no science. We even have a minister, who’s sitting in the chair now, who I asked for evidence. She gave me 25-plus papers, and not one shred of evidence. Some of them even said there is no warming going on. It’s amazing, yet she listed them as evidence.
And we hear things like ‘the science says’, and not one person has distinguished themselves by characterising any of that above natural variability, as Senator Hanson said earlier today. Natural variability is cyclical, inherent, natural variation. That’s all we see in the climate signal. And the Greens won’t debate me. I first asked Senator Larissa Waters on Thursday 7 October 2010, at a public forum at New Farm, where we both shared the dais, along with three other people. I challenged her to a debate. She jumped to her feet faster than I have ever seen her move and said, ‘I will not debate you!’ She came up to me after the forum and said, ‘I will not debate you.’ I challenged her again, along with Mark Butler, Labor’s climate spokesman at the time, on Tuesday 14 June 2016 at the Solar Council Forum, where I was not a participant, and I challenged him to a debate. Both ran from the challenge. Monday 9 September 2019 was the first day I challenged the Greens officially in the Senate—Senator Di Natale and Senator Larissa Waters. Never have they debated with me. They will not present the science. They won’t treat the Senate with the respect of presenting empirical scientific data and logical scientific point—never; I’m still waiting.
And why won’t they debate? Because they know they haven’t got the science. Yet we’re now sending, thanks to the government, millions of dollars to the people of Tuvalu because their sea levels are rising, when the data shows that that is not happening anywhere near that extent, and it’s all natural.
One of the two biggest problems we have in this country is shoddy governance, driven by a lack of data and a lack of objectivity, reinforced by denial. The second thing is ceding our sovereignty. That doesn’t apply in this debate, but we are ceding the future of our children and the future of our country by not using objective empirical scientific data within logical scientific points.
This bill is seeking to provide biosecurity officers with increased powers. With everything we’ve been through over the past few years, I decided to ask for clarification on the bill. I questioned how these new powers could be used and whether there was a risk of discrimination against arrivals into Australia, particularly those who have chosen not to receive medical procedures such as the COVID-19 injections.
I am concerned these amendments would ensure the collection of data from all incoming travellers to support intelligence-gathering and evidence-based predictions of potential biosecurity risks.
Minister Watt offered assurances in the Senate Chamber that there is no intention of using the bill to discriminate against people based on medical status or ethnicity. He also assured me that this bill did not allow for collecting or retaining health information.
Transcript
Senator Roberts: I have two questions. The first is of the minister: could this bill be used to discriminate against arrivals who have chosen not to receive injections related to COVID-19 measures? As part of that, does this bill allow travel documents to include information based on vaccine status?
Senator Watt: I’m just seeking some further advice on that, Senator Roberts, but I’m certainly not aware of any intention to use these powers in that way or even whether the powers could be used that way. I know that there were some concerns raised by a couple of the parliamentary committees about how these powers might be used and the risk of discrimination that might be posed. I think we were certainly able to persuade those committees that there would be no such ability to discriminate. You may have seen, Senator Roberts, that one of the things this bill is doing is providing biosecurity officers with increased powers to seek passports from people, but that’s really about trying to check where they have been and whether they’re repeat offenders when it comes to biosecurity risks rather than checking on people because of their particular racial background, their COVID vaccination background or anything like that. It’s more about, as I said, allowing biosecurity officers to trace when people have been to very high-risk locations or if they’re repeat offenders with biosecurity, in which case I’m sure you’d agree that they’re the people who we really need to focus our biosecurity efforts on.
Senator Roberts: Minister, have you received that advice yet about my specific question?
Senator Watt: The proposed amendments are intended to ensure that the data collected in relation to biosecurity interventions with all incoming travellers can be recorded and analysed consistently to support a more intelligence- and evidence-based approach to predicting and managing the biosecurity risk posed by future traveller cohorts. As such, the requirement to provide a passport or other travel document to a biosecurity officer upon request would apply to all persons regardless of their ethnicity, their national or social origin or their vaccination status. The powers that are being granted here cannot be, or are not intended to be, used to go after particular people based on any characteristic about them. They can be applied to all people, regardless of their vaccination status, their ethnicity or anything like that. I think that you can be confident that your concerns would not be carried out as a result of these powers.
Senator Roberts: You said ‘could’ and then hesitated. So that means these powers cannot be used to discriminate against arrivals who have chosen not to receive injections for COVID-19?
Senator Watt: That’s right. The powers cannot be used to discriminate against anyone for any reason, including their vaccination status.
Senator Roberts: My second question is: should there be time limits on the time which health information about an individual is retained?
Senator Watt: In fact, Senator Roberts, this bill does not provide for the retention of data at all. That being the case, the concern that you have does not even arise. It’s not a matter of—sorry, I’ll just clarify this. There’s nothing in the bill that allows data to be retained for health purposes and so the issue of how long data could be retained for health purposes doesn’t arise, because it can’t be retained for that purpose at all.
https://img.youtube.com/vi/JiJwE9TSfqU/maxresdefault.jpg7201280Sheenagh Langdonhttps://www.malcolmrobertsqld.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/One-Nation-Logo1-300x150.pngSheenagh Langdon2023-09-05 08:52:032023-09-14 10:46:37Amending the Biosecurity Act — What Does it Mean?
Data on births and deaths is 2 years and 9 months overdue. It should be delayed 6 weeks at the latest. How can we assess the impact of health policy without this vital data?
Transcript
Yesterday, in questions without notice, I asked Senator Gallagher, the Minister representing the Minister for Health and Aged Care, about the availability of birth data. Her response included a statement to the effect that this information is available from the states. Senator Gallagher needs to be aware that it used to be available. New South Wales, South Australia, the ACT and the Northern Territory no longer publish this data. Queensland publishes data at the end of the year, meaning Queensland data is nine months out of date. Victorian data is already available for August 2022, so someone down there is doing their job.
Victorian births in August 2021 were 6,700. In August 2022, they were 5,900. Western Australia provides quarterly data for births: in the June quarter 2021, there were 8,750 births; in the same period this year, there were 8,060. That’s all the data we have. How can we make life-and-death decisions with insufficient information? These variations could just be the lockdown babies working through the system. They could be anything. We don’t know, and that is the problem.
When health policy has been as intrusive, expensive and controversial as Lib-Lab’s COVID response, wouldn’t this data be compulsory viewing for decision-makers? And yet the best the Commonwealth Bureau of Statistics can manage for births and cause of death is December 2020. That’s 20 months behind. What are they hiding, as I asked? Data for provisional mortality is four months behind, while Victoria can provide their data in five days. All the states use sophisticated reporting routines. The data delay is not with the states. I have submitted a document discovery for the latest data the ABS has on births, deaths and cause of mortality. As long as COVID is said to continue, this data should be provided monthly—one month behind, not two years and nine months behind. We have one flag. We are one community. We are one nation.
https://img.youtube.com/vi/QDTqYKq8v4g/mqdefault.jpg180320Senator Malcolm Robertshttps://www.malcolmrobertsqld.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/One-Nation-Logo1-300x150.pngSenator Malcolm Roberts2022-09-07 13:20:232022-09-07 13:20:28Is birth and death data being hidden?
I gave the following speech this afternoon in response to the Greens wanting even more damaging climate policies.
Transcript
One Nation does not support this motion. One Nation supports policies that are based on empirical scientific evidence. Without robust scientific evidence policies are not worth the paper they’re written on. By avoiding robust scientific evidence to support policies, politicians are able to base policies on their political and ideological whims and vested interests.
As we recently learned, the CSIRO, which advises the government on climate science, has been caught out relying on discredited scientific papers and unvalidated models as the basis for advice to government on climate policy.
The Liberal-Nationals and the Labor-Greens have no empirical evidence that the production of human carbon dioxide is affecting the climate and needs to be cut. Until there is, all climate policies need to be scrapped. I remind the Senate that this is day 419 since I first challenged the Leader of the Greens in the Senate to provide the evidence and to debate me.
7 October marks a decade since I first challenged her to debate me and she has not fronted after immediately refusing.
This week Senator Malcolm Roberts revealed CSIRO’s complete lack of scientific justification for climate policies and CSIRO’s only response was to state their world ranking.
Senator Roberts said, “CSIRO’s response to my findings came before my report was even released, which reinforces the academic arrogance that comes from believing they are above questioning.
“We all know CSIRO is an iconic and esteemed Australian institution in many areas of research, which is why its track record on climate science is so worrying; it’s not up to standard.”
Three levels of government base expensive and far reaching climate policies on CSIRO’s advice, which largely comes from inadequate and unvalidated climate models.
“Rather than address the obvious flaws in their climate research, CSIRO chose instead to deflect to a lame appeal to authority, instead of citing credible science.”
The absence of a scientific response from CSIRO can only mean that they stand by the discredited and contradictory papers they cited and later withdrew, because the papers failed to prove their claim.
“Let me make this very clear, all politicians need to be seriously questioning the science that they glibly use to make climate policies, and Parliament must scrutinise the quality of this science.
“The CSIRO’s flawed climate models have not been validated, they contradict real world measurements and should not be used as the basis for spending billions of dollars of taxpayers money on damaging policies,” added Senator Roberts.
A team of 17 acclaimed climate scientists reviewed CSIRO’s evidence and were sadly disappointed with CSIRO’S lack of scientific rigour.
Senator Roberts will travel to Queensland’s major regional centres next week listening to people across many industries that poor science and damaging policy have ravaged.
“We must have an Office of Scientific Integrity that will scrutinise the science, protect scientists from politicisation and give all industry players the confidence that the policy is warranted and just,” concluded Senator Roberts.
Today, Australia officially entered into the “COVID19 recession” with the economy contracting by 7% in the second quarter of 2020. This recession was avoidable if the Australian government, States and Territories had use the best available data and experience from around the world rather than reacting to models that predicted an armageddon.
In this speech to the Senate I discuss Taiwan which has dealt with the COVID19 heath issues properly because they maintained their economy. While Taiwan has a similar population to Australia, they have only had 7 deaths. I first talked about Taiwan in March, including writing to the Prime Minister asking him to look at the data from Taiwan and consider changing course.
He refused. And now we are in a recession with over 1 million people out of work.
CSIRO has misled parliament. Last night in the Senate I laid out my argument that the CSIRO has misled parliament by allowing the government to base climate policies on CSIRO’s advice which includes discredited scientific papers and unvalidated models.
The onus is now on parliament to provide the empirical scientific evidence proving that carbon dioxide from human activity needs to be cut. Until that is provided, the government must immediately halt all climate policies which are a multi-billion drag on our economy.
