Sean Edwards (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise tonight to speak on the Migration Amendment (Strengthening Biometrics Integrity) Bill 2015. I am very pleased to speak on this bill because, as we are acutely aware, it will further enhance what we have come to know as protecting this country from the forces of evil which would do us much damage. And it will deter those people in this country who would be tempted to go off and fight on distant shores for ideological reasons which we think are quite fundamental in their context and are such that we need to ensure the safety of our borders.

In fact, the first priority of government is to ensure that its peoples and the people who reside in the country are safe. This bill will ensure that the people we screen at our ports, airports—and through any other way in which people arrive in this country—are put through a system of tests that will personally identify them. With these tests we can assess physical characteristics, facial images, fingerprints and even the iris of the eyes, which can be digitised into a biometric template that we can check against all of the data we have stored from previous record keeping.

The measures in the bill go to address the gaps in our current legislation which remove restrictions that will assist to identify those people who cross borders. This legislation, at its very heart, is about our border security. Law enforcement and the travel patterns of people travelling to and from our country can be assessed—and why shouldn't we do that? If somebody has not got anything to hide or has not got anything of a dark nature going on, then they will have no problem with submitting themselves to these kinds of tests because this is fundamentally one of the most important issues going on in political circles around the globe. If you do not feel safe in your country, if you do not feel you can invest with your family in a country that has porous borders and which allows no scrutiny of who comes and goes, then you are destined for a lack of confidence which will pervade our very society.

The bill provides for a framework to enable the Department of Immigration and Border Protection to counter the current initiatives and the technology used by those who are arriving illegally to gain access to this great country of ours, Australia. Those people will be submitted to security checks either randomly or as a matter of course. We can now check the biometric details with their biographic details and their passports, their date of birth and their nationality. It also provides a framework which will enable manual fingerprint-based checks to be carried out using mobile hand-held devices to detect persons of concern. That is all we are on about. We are not about going after holidaymakers or people who would seek to come to this country to enjoy the vast array of attractions that lie within. This is so that our border protection forces have the ability, when they have someone in the frame, to ensure that they are right and correct beyond all reasonable doubt. It is really no impost to anybody who has nothing to hide. These checks will be conducted at embarkation ports and will take 20 to 40 seconds. In that time the traveller's identity will be checked against Immigration and security agency data holdings, using up to four finger images. That is fairly innocuous testing. It certainly will not impinge on anybody's personal liberties and, for anybody who has nothing to hide, will hardly be a hardship.

I just brought up the issue of personal rights and infringement. The important thing is that neither these images nor this data will be retained following the completion of these checks, which is a very important thing for those who are concerned about the retention of data. As we know, currently, biometrics and the way in which technology has been assembled and the fact that we are able to use and mobilise it in this way rests on a foundation of accurate identification. These fingerprints provide a higher integrity identity assurance, far more so than any identity documentation and facial images. We have all seen the 'Spooks' movies where a specialist passport forger is sitting in some back room with a scalpel cutting open unwittingly naïve tourists' passports, inserting different photos so that people can take on other people's identity. The truth is not very different from those fictions. These biometric measures will certainly go a long way to ensuring that that fiction is not the reality.

Biometrics are checked instantly against existing immigration data holdings held by Australian law enforcement agencies, which, as we are aware, are somewhat beyond reproach in terms of integrity and efficiency, and are indeed, at this very time, carrying out one of the most efficient border protection plans that this nation has undertaken. All credit should go to Minister Cash for her work in this area because since this government has come to power we have had only one boat arrival and indeed there are now no children in detention in offshore processing centres. That is in stark contrast to during the previous government's time, where we had over 600 boat arrivals—one every 15 hours, as we learned today. In an effort to continuing our border protection it is only natural that we reach to biometrics to make sure no people travel, that no foreign fighters come home to ply their radicalised trade in our cities and in among our people and to target any of the non-suspecting Australian public. The minister would be under all kinds of scrutiny if she did not have some method by which to ensure that these people cannot come here to do harm.

Minister, it is opportune that you are in the chamber listening to this contribution because the work we do here is for no other reason than for the benefit of and for the sustained enjoyment of the Australian lifestyle which we have come to know. It is so important that people have faith in what we, as policymakers, put in place for our border protection and for our security agencies, for those people to have the most modern tools with which to identify any risks. For that, I commend you on having the courage to put this forward. I hope that the contributions you get from all sides of this chamber recognise the good intentions of this bill, what it is meant to do. We are all obviously terribly disappointed that we have to implement such measures to ensure the security of our borders and the security of our communities. We do not want another Martin Place siege. We certainly do not want to have somebody returning from a foreign land or somebody coming to this land enacting such a heinous crime. And without evoking all the emotions that go with that terrible tragedy, it is difficult to think that, as a minister who had this technology available did not obviously deploy it at every entry point to this country to ensure that we do not increase the risk of anything of that nature again.

We have a lot of cooperation with regard to this and obviously those people who understand that there is a lot of sharing between countries of details of people of interest, of people who have dark pasts. The Australian law enforcement agencies obviously deal with five other partner countries in their conferences. They have revealed a number of undisclosed adverse immigration and criminal history information of non-citizens and discrepancies in the biographic information provided by non-citizens. So we are already ahead of the curve on this, but our agencies need the legislative imprimatur to ensure they will be able to implement this, to enjoy the full benefit of the technology.

The government amendment extends the protections found in section 258F of the act to any means of collecting personal identifiers such as the new broad power introduced by the bill—that is, to make it clear that nothing in the Migration Act authorises the minister or an officer to require a person to provide a personal identifier under broad power in a cruel, inhumane or degrading way or in a way that fails to treat the person with humanity and with respect for human dignity. These are by no means in any way invasive. As I have said, if you have nothing to fear, you will have no problem submitting yourself to these tests. Also, the government is looking to affirm an individual's right to physical integrity and freedom from cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment and to ensure that all the collection is done with the utmost human dignity.

There is also a provision that the requirement for the provision of a personal identifier under the new broad power is not going to be inhumane or degrading, or fail to treat a person with dignity. No matter what the naysayers say—and I have not heard too many, I must say, on this issue—I think that everybody in this country accepts that if there is technology available then why would we not avail ourselves of it to ensure that we do have a secure country and that we do not put any hazard in the way of the everyday functioning of our society? It certainly makes sense for us to have that deployed.

What we are doing—what the minister is seeking to do—simply makes all of that clear in the face of the legislation. The specific measures in this bill ensure that the government and those people who do the government's work—no matter what government is in power—are able to take the risk out, wherever those people come from and wherever you get threats. Currently, the conflict is taking place in war-torn areas in the Middle East. There is Iraq, and Syria is in the middle of a civil war. People are being radicalised on our shores, travelling for whatever reason to those places and travelling back. The only reason that we are doing this is to ensure that whatever threat comes to Australia is dealt with at the border and not when it becomes an issue outside the border controls.

Biometrics is by no means an untested measure. The technology is well established; it is something that is irrefutable and no longer a fiction. It is something that people can rely on, trust and know that it will be administered in a way in which they can have confidence. They can also be sure in the ongoing process of this that we can continuously upgrade the biometric records of those people who we believe should be monitored—those people who may present a threat or who are identified in a demographic as people who we need to ensure do not become a threat to this country.

The expansion of the department's biometric program has resulted in some non-citizens providing personal identifiers but not others, depending on the timing of their visa application or arrival in Australia. As a result, the higher-integrity biometric-based identity and security law enforcement and immigration history checks have only been conducted in non-citizens.

As I start to conclude my remarks this evening I say that this is what responsible government does with issues which are of concern—red flag issues which are high on the community's priority list. I do not think that there is anybody who could go out there and walk the streets in Martin Place, the Pitt Street Mall, the Bourke Street Mall or the Rundle Mall—any of those—and find that this issue would not be a lightning rod for agreement. Everybody wants to understand that the government has control. I think that the issues that we see being played out in Northern Africa into Europe, with the explosion of illegal immigrants seeking to go to other countries, exposes those countries to a great deal of risk. We have arrested the risk of people coming to these shores unfettered. The minister is seeking for this country to be able to monitor the small flow of people to these shores.

I commend this bill and the amendment to the parliament. I ask that all those looking at making a contribution to support this as well.