Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Home Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the fantastic member for Fraser for his question and acknowledge his brilliant advocacy for his community. Cybersecurity affects the lives of every single Australian, and it is absolutely critical to our national security. The honourable member is right: it was a great pity for us to arrive in government a year ago to find that Australian cybersecurity was in an absolute mess. We had no policy leadership. We had no real attempt to coordinate the work of cyber being done across government or indeed across the economy. We had no cyber incident response function in the Australian government. We were left with a cybersecurity framework that was five years out of date and a privacy framework there was a decade out of date. None of this is particularly surprising—

Hon. Members:

Honourable members interjecting—

Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Home Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'm getting some interjections; there are a few people who are touchy about this. But none of it is surprising because the truth is that the former government did not even have a cybersecurity minister. What were they expecting? This astounds me because of the scope and scale—

Milton Dick (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! The minister will resume her seat. The Manager of Opposition Business will withdraw that comment.

Paul Fletcher (Bradfield, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Government Services and the Digital Economy) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I withdraw.

Milton Dick (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The minister is in continuation.

Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Home Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The absolutely appalling leadership shown by the former government astounds me because of the scope and scale of this problem. We were told last year by the National Australia Bank that they are subjected to 50 million cyberattacks a month. The Australian Taxation Office is subjected to three million cyberattacks a month. What we know about this problem is that it is likely to get significantly worse over the coming years. We've got changing technology which the Minister for Industry and Science talked about before which will radically change this landscape. We've got a geopolitical situation that's very challenging for our country.

There is a huge amount of phenomenal work occurring now within the Australian government on this matter. We've set up the hackers task force, a 100-strong force of ASD and AFP officers who are hacking back at the criminals who seek to do us harm. We've taken over leadership of the Counter Ransomware Initiative: a 38-country organisation which is assisting us in tackling this global problem. We have declared 82 systems of national significance. These are the pieces of infrastructure in our economy that are so important that, if they did come under cyberattack, it would constitute a national security incident. We've now set minimum cyber standards for 11 sectors in the Australian economy.

Last week, we kicked off the new cybersecurity National Exercise Program. This is a very important part of our national defence. The truth is that, even if we do everything we can to prevent cyberattacks, we cannot reduce the cybersecurity risks to zero, so what is just as important as a deterrence piece is what we do when we think about recovery. The first cyber exercise kicked off in financial services. For the first time, the government got together the banks, the regulators and the parts of government that would assist if our financial services system came under attack. A business leader who participated in that program texted me on Friday night saying that it was the best government and industry collaboration he has ever worked in. I'm really proud of that. I'm proud of my department and proud of this government, which is doing this important work for the first time for our country.