Tim Watts (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Communications) Share this | Hansard source

Well, it's been hard to keep up with the rorts and corrupt programs that the Morrison government rolled out in the lead-up to the last election. There have been sports rorts, regional rorts, road rorts, car park rorts, pool rorts, grants for women's change rooms for footy clubs without women's teams, grants for projects that had already been announced and built—and just coincidentally happen to be in the Prime Minister's electorate—and regional infrastructure grants that went to swimming pools underneath the Sydney Harbour Bridge. We saw 156 out of 166 grants allocated under the Building Better Regions Fund—94 per cent of grants—going to electorates that the coalition either held or was targeting in the two months before the election. Incredibly, we have seen $636.7 million in grants handed out by the Morrison government in the six months leading up to the last federal election. That is $100 million more than the government provided to the ABC in the same period. It's been hard to keep track. We've seen so many rorts that they have all combined in the public mind into one great big rort—a rort so big it has its own chaotic weather system, a 'rort sharknado', swirling with Liberal candidates and National Party donors, all trying to get their taste of the latest corrupt program. We saw astonishing things flying around in this 'rort sharknado': destroyed notes, colour-coded spreadsheet and breaches of the caretaker convention. But at the centre of it, at the heart of this government, in the middle of the 'rort sharknado' we find nothing—no climate change policy, no wages policy, no productivity policy, and no plan to guide Australia's already stalling economy through the challenging international environment that we now face. We find just a whirlwind of rorts swirling around an empty core—no policy agenda and no point to its existence.

Those opposite talk small government and then carry big cheques. They talk small government as IPA research follows and carry giant novelty checks as Liberal Party candidates. Perhaps the worst thing, though, about all these rorts is that the Prime Minister insists it is all fine. He asked a former staffer of his to investigate it and he confirmed that it was all fine. In fact, it was so fine that we didn't even need to see the report. If it wasn't so serious, it would be laughable.

The Prime Minister has been content to dish up the most shameful, slippery spin in defence of these corrupt programs. The Prime Minister has said repeatedly that it was fine that his government ignored literally hundreds of independent recommendations from Sport Australia in favour of grants for projects in targeted seats because all those projects were 'eligible'. It's as if giving the Gold Coast Suns the premiership cup last year, regardless of how well they performed on the field, according to the rules would have been fine because they were 'eligible'. Even this couldn't hold up, though, as we learnt that 43 per cent of the grants provided in the sports rorts scandal went to ineligible projects.

The Prime Minister spent weeks telling the Australian public that he wasn't involved in the sports rorts scandal, that it was all the minister. And then we discovered hundreds of emails from his office to the former minister about which project should receive grants. The thing is, though—and this is the worst part of it—that he never expected the Australian public to believe this flimsy fig leaf of a defence of this program; he expected the Australian public not to care. His calculation was that Australians would expect politicians to act in their own interests over the interests of the Australian public, to act in a partisan interest over the national interest. All members of this chamber, all parliamentarians, should be outraged by this reflection on the integrity of all of us. Australians should expect better of their government, this parliament and their democracy. We should be outraged on their behalf.

This isn't a Canberra bubble issue or a political triviality; this goes to the heart of the integrity of our system of government. University of Sydney professor Anne Twomey told the Senate committee inquiring into the sports rorts scandal that this is 'a very serious matter involving unlawful government spending of public money on a significant scale'. Professor AJ Brown, a board member of Transparency International, has made it clear that it is 'a clear case of political corruption'. At a time when public trust and confidence in our democracy is in freefall, this entire scandal underlines the urgent need for a national integrity commission in this country, with teeth, to ensure that rorts like this never happen again.

On national television yesterday, we saw the Minister for Home Affairs struggling to answer the question 'Why is right-wing extremism growing in this country?' No less an authority than Mike Burgess, the head of ASIO, told us as much last week. But Minister Dutton, seemingly ignorant of the cultural conditions necessary for the growth of far right extremism, stumbled into an answer—the dark web. It wasn't quite a George Brandis style metadata moment, but it revealed the same level of technological ignorance we've come to expect from this government. The dark web is simply a part of the internet comprising sites that you can't search for on typical search engines like Google. You can access it within minutes, though; all you need to do is download a free specialist driver that has access to The Onion Router.

Sites on the dark web were designed with privacy in mind, which is a neutral value. Political activists and dissidents use it to elude the eye of autocratic states. At the same time, drug dealers, hackers and child abusers try to use it to traffic in their illegal, destructive and propulsive goods. Silk Road was an infamous early black market that flourished on the dark web, and certainly the dark web requires policing. But, as the Minister For Home Affairs suggested yesterday, it is not where people are being radicalised to right-wing extremism; that is happening in plain sight. Today, people are being radicalised on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube and then often pushed towards less restricted but still public forums like Reddit and 8kun, previously 8chan. 8chan is notorious for hosting extreme right-wing views celebrating Nazism and violence. But it is not the dark web; and nor is The Daily Stormer, an explicitly neo-Nazi site that mobilises so-called tribal armies in campaigns of targeted harassment against enemies.

Take, for example, Caleb Cain, who was the subject of a New York Times profile last year. A young college dropout, Caleb was unsure and insecure in the world. He sought belonging and purpose. He found this with right-wing extremists on YouTube, not on the dark web. He found this with far-right videos. Cain was vulnerable and brainwashed, he was ideologically seduced—a condition made easier by YouTube recommendation algorithms, which drove him to more and more extreme content. Cain's story is an extremely common line. After five years, he finally left the rabbit hole of alt-right rhetoric and conspiracy theories. Radicalisation happens to non-radicalised people—not the people lurking in the shadowy recesses of the web already but those on popular mainstream platforms.

Right-wing extremism is even more mainstream than social media platforms. You only need to turn on the TV. When white nationalist Blair Cottrell, a convicted arsonist and stalker, appeared on mainstream Australian television, we know that the Christchurch terrorist was watching and cheering. Blair Cottrell is a man who venerates Hitler and wishes that Mein Kampf would be taught in schools, but he was invited on television not as an extremist but as a commentator. He was invited on television not as a white supremacist but as a concerned citizen. When a violent champion of Hitler is presented to the public as a concerned citizen, the sound you hear is the shattering of the Overton window—the customary boundaries of victim discourse. Recently we've seen a Victoria Police member flash an alt-Right hand sign at a public rally he was policing. We have had the head of ASIO tell us that, increasingly, men are gathering at homes and clubhouses around the country to salute the swastika and discuss arms and training.

Blaming the dark web for this misses the point badly. In fact the Christchurch Call to Action, the New Zealand and French governments' response to the massacre of 51 men, women and children by an Australian, does not mention the dark web in its recommendations to combat right-wing extremism—not once. What's more, the Christchurch call stresses non-technical measures to counter violent extremism—intervention programs, social cohesion programs, increased law enforcement and government working with tech companies to offer counter-narratives to extremist propaganda. Yet we now know the government has invested less than $2 million a year in extremist intervention programs since 2013-14 and, more broadly, has invested under $6 million a year in programs that counter violent extremism. Regarding its collaboration with online service providers, the government speaks of 'a range of activities' to promote positive alternatives and counter the messaging depicted in violent extremist propaganda. But it can't specify one; it can't give a single example.

Abhorrent things are bought and sold on the dark web. But using the dark web as the answer to the question of why right-wing extremism is growing in this country is ignorant and inadequate, not least when the global terror index says there's been a 320 per cent increase in far-Right terror over the past five years. It's alarming that the minister responsible for countering domestic terrorism and violent extremism doesn't seem to understand either radicalisation or the internet, and it's alarming that the minister can't account for the rise of radical right-wing extremism in this country.

This morning Australians woke up to a newspaper headline that the personal data of more than a million Australians was at risk—a depressingly familiar occurrence. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner receives around 1,000 notifications of data breaches under Australia's mandatory data breach notification scheme. This time we didn't learn about the scheme through a mandatory notification from the company but from a whistleblower. The whistleblower released documents that allege that power company Alinta's cybersecurity has been rated as 'recklessly bad' by auditors and that the company has a 'cavalier approach' to security. Leaked reports and emails tell us that EY completed an attached damning privacy internal audit in June 2019. The report highlights fundamental issues with privacy, data protection and compliance with legal obligations in cybersecurity. Elsewhere the auditor suggests that customer data has been so poorly secured that Australian privacy law may have been breached.

Here is what else we know. When Alinta was sold to a foreign owner three years ago, the Foreign Investment Review Board imposed a number of specific obligations on the company to protect personal data it held about its customers. There's nothing surprising about this. David Irvine, the chair of the Foreign Investment Review Board and the former head of ASIO and ASIS, has repeatedly warned about the need to protect Australians' personal data in foreign acquisitions. He has made this clear in a series of speeches. This a sensible and proportionate intervention.

The risks and consequences of data breaches and misuse have been growing significantly in recent years, and so too has the attention of FIRB. But what has the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government done to protect the security of Australians' private data? Spoiler alert—nothing. A year ago the Attorney-General told Australians:

Existing protections and penalties for misuse of Australians' personal information under the Privacy Act fall short of community expectations …

He's right: Australian privacy law requires companies to take reasonable steps to protect personal data that they hold from misuse, interference and loss as well as unauthorised access, modification or disclosure.

Yet, despite there being around a thousand security breaches affecting Australians' personal data disclosed every year, the OAIC has never sought to impose a pecuniary penalty—a fine—on a company for failing to protect Australians' personal data in contravention of privacy laws. Compare this with the EU, which has so far seen 144 million euros in fines for breaches of its General Data Protection Regulation, or even with the US, where, in July last year, the credit reporting agency Equifax agreed to pay at least $575 million as part of its settlement with the US FTC after its inadequately secured networks were breached and the private data of 147 million Americans was compromised. The Attorney-General was right when he said existing protections were inadequate, but that was 12 months ago—12 months of growing risks and consequences of data breaches of Australians while the government has done nothing to follow through on its commitments. While FIRB has been getting increasingly concerned about the risks to Australians' private personal data, the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government has done nothing on data security for 12 months. Just like the Attorney-General's religious discrimination bills and his national integrity commission bill, his privacy act amendments are MIA.

This is just like the situation we confronted before the banking royal commission. There are chronic cultural problems with the way that Australian organisations treat the personal information they hold. There's a culture of impunity in the face of regulatory inaction. To put it bluntly, no-one believes there are regulatory consequences for failing to protect Australians' personal information. Sure, you might cop a bit of bad PR and a temporary stock market hit, but it will wash out in no time.

Australians deserve better. The Morrison government needs to act to ensure that Australians' personal information is treated with the care and respect that it deserves. This government talks a big game on security issues, but it's just not capable of following through.

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