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.