Mark Dreyfus (Isaacs, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Hansard source

Since the beginning of this public health crisis, Labor's focus has been on saving lives and saving jobs. As the Leader of the Opposition has said on many occasions, Labor is looking for outcomes, not arguments. That is the spirit in which we have approached the Privacy Amendment (Public Health Contact Information) Bill 2020 and the government's contact tracing app more generally.

My colleagues and I believe that a contact tracing app can be a valuable tool for protecting Australians from coronavirus. But, to be a valuable tool, the app has to work and Australians must have complete confidence that their privacy is protected and that the data collected by the app will never be used for any purpose other than contact tracing during the current health crisis. Without that confidence, millions of Australians will not download the app and its value as a public health tool will be severely compromised, even if it works effectively in a technical sense.

At the outset, the Prime Minister said that at least 40 per cent of the Australian population needed to download the app for it to be an effective tool—that means about 10 million Australians. The government is well short of that figure at the moment. I understand that about 5.5 million Australians have downloaded the COVIDSafe app so far, but my colleagues and I hope that this bill and Labor's support for it will help to build the public confidence that is needed to persuade many millions more to download it.

One of the reasons why I support the passage of this bill is the very positive engagement that I have had with the Attorney-General over the last week. Following the release of the draft legislation, last Monday evening I approached the Attorney-General with a number of suggestions for improving the bill and boosting public confidence. To his credit, the Attorney-General considered, in good faith, all of the concerns I raised with him, and he has sought to address most of them in the version of the bill that is now before the House. Those amendments have improved the bill in a variety of ways. For example, there is now greater clarity about what data is protected by the strict privacy safeguards contained in the bill.

The bill now provides for greater oversight of the COVIDSafe app and the handling of COVIDSafe data by the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner. The bill now makes it clear that no intelligence agency or law enforcement agency can be given a role in administering the COVIDSafe data store. Where it is unlikely to prejudice a law enforcement investigation, the bill now allows the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner to continue an investigation even where the investigation overlaps with an investigation by law enforcement. And the bill now includes a number of public reporting requirements so that the Australian people can be kept informed about the operation and effectiveness of the app and the level of compliance with the privacy safeguards contained in the bill. This is now a stronger and better piece of legislation as a result of constructive engagement between Labor and the government. For that, I would like to give particular credit and extend my thanks to the Attorney-General and his office.

I understand that a number of my colleagues will speak about some of the suggestions from Labor that were not adopted by the government. While each of those concerns is important, they must be kept in perspective, particularly when it comes to the issue of privacy. To be clear: this bill will introduce the strongest privacy safeguards that have ever been put in place by any Australian parliament. That is despite the fact that the COVIDSafe app is voluntary and the data that it collects is, compared to other personal information that's routinely collected by governments and corporations, relatively innocuous. This bill takes privacy seriously.

I would also like to assure Australians that this is not a case of set and forget. Labor will keep an eye on how the measures in the bill are being implemented to ensure that they are effective and working as intended. I expect the Attorney-General will be doing the same. Necessarily, this bill had to be drafted quickly and it has not gone through the usual parliamentary committee processes of review. As such, it has not received the same degree of scrutiny that a bill would typically be subject to. For that reason, I welcome last Friday's announcement by the Senate Select Committee on COVID-19 that it intends to oversee the COVIDSafe app and this legislation by reviewing the rollout of the appropriate—

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