Murray Watt (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I also rise to speak on this bill. I do so as a member of the community affairs committee, which conducted a hearing into this legislation in Sydney a week or two ago. As my Labor colleagues have said, and as I want to say at the outset: Labor strongly supports the establishment of a national cancer screening register. As a member of the committee, I was apprised of the benefits of this register, particularly to improve procedures around screening to make sure that we keep people alive longer—that is essentially what this comes down to. Labor also supports the improvements to cancer-screening programs that the new register will support.

But we do have concerns about the government's legislation. This register will hold Australians' most sensitive health data, like the results of cervical and bowel cancer screening, and we need to get such a sensitive matter right. So Labor does have serious concerns about the government's shambolic approach to this important legislation. On the eve of the election, the Turnbull government signed a $220 million contract to outsource this register to Telstra before parliament even saw the legislation. So we had a government that had not put through the legislation that was required to facilitate this register, and yet the very same government were hell-bent on rushing through and signing a contract to get this register up and running—mysteriously, on the eve of the election. You can only assume that they did so in order to have a great little campaign announcement without actually having done their homework in getting the necessary legislation in place.

Now, as we are becoming used to from the Turnbull government, we see another stuff-up. The government have bungled the bills to establish the register in their rush to pass this legislation retrospectively. When Labor and the crossbench first referred the government's bills to a Senate inquiry, the Minister for Health and Aged Care, Sussan Ley, accused Labor of a hysterical tirade. But, in an embarrassing rebuke of the government, their own Information Commissioner made six recommendations to the Senate inquiry to fix the legislation. So their very own commissioner raised concerns about matters in this legislation that were very basic privacy and data restriction matters that the government had not taken into account in drafting the legislation. At the committee hearing, even government senators, on hearing the evidence of the privacy and information commissioner, indicated that there did seem to be some benefits in considering the amendments that the commissioner proposed. Some of the loopholes identified by the commissioner were incredibly alarming. For example, the government's bills as drafted may allow the register operator to collect all Medicare claims information on people who are on the register. I well remember during the federal election that we had a bit of a debate about Medicare. Do you remember that, Senator Polley?