Murray Watt (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

T (—) (): Thanks again, Senator Roberts. Senator Gallagher, as Senator Wong has indicated, is the responsible minister here. Senator Gallagher has informed me that this is a priority issue being considered by state, territory and Commonwealth ministers responsible for data management within government and it is intended that they will discuss this matter at a forthcoming meeting of the ministerial council.

More broadly, not only is our government investigating these matters very seriously but we have already commenced a range of reviews around the Privacy Act, cybersecurity. Those reviews commenced before this latest incident, and, frankly, the fact this incident has occurred indicates that our laws do need a massive overhaul and were left neglected by the former government. We take these issues very seriously. We are not going to dither, like the former government did and we're not going to leave Australians exposed in the way that the former government did.