Productivity Commission: how big data could work for us

What if we were on the cusp of one of the biggest ever advances in productivity and we didn't recognise it?

That's how it must have been for Alexander Fleming with the discovery of penicillin, for university technicians with the development of the internet, and for Bill Clinton, who with the stroke of a pen in the year 2000, made highly accurate military global positioning satellites available for everyone to use for free.

Peter Harris believes we are on the cusp of another transformation about as big – one only made possible by the development of the internet and all the things that surround it.

It's the exploitation of data. On one estimate we are now generating as much digital data every two days (five exabytes) as we generated in an entire year at the start of the 2000s.

Some of it is cat videos. Much of it mundane. But an awful lot is useful, and his best guess is that only 5 per cent of the useful stuff is being used, a figure that puts us way behind the countries we usually like to compare ourselves to, especially Britain and New Zealand.

We are behind partly for privacy reasons, partly because potential users don't know what data government agencies hold, and partly because the machines that hold it often can't talk to each other, even within the same hospitals.

It is an outrage that sick patients still have to act as information conduits between healthcare providers (10 to 25 per cent of the medical tests ordered are thought to be duplicates) and a disgrace that 60 years after the Thalidomide tragedy we still don't link prescription data to hospitalisation records to get insights into the side effects of drugs.

Research that could have saved the lives of Indigenous women was delayed five years while the researchers waited for ethics approval to see cervical cancer screening data; researchers wanting to study the link between vaccination and admission to hospital have had to wait eight years and counting.

Harris runs the Productivity Commission. It is a measure of his belief in the importance of the data inquiry commissioned by the Turnbull government that he decided to chair it himself and personally briefed journalists on the contents of his draft report on Wednesday.

His first recommendation is that all government-funded entities create easy-to-access registers of everything they've got. He wants them published by October 2017. If anyone wants a machine-readable copy of something on a register, they should be able to get it for free or for marginal cost, unless there are powerful reasons for holding it back.

Given how much personal data so many of us willingly or carelessly give away every day, he isn't particularly concerned about the privacy risks of releasing de-identified personal data (and allowing it to be linked to other data, as the Bureau of Statistics wants to do with the census), saying the risks are "likely very small". Where there's a clear public interest, he wants researchers to be given access to private information in secure rooms.

Right now they are often required to destroy datasets they create in medical and other research, a practice he says is akin to "book burning". He would require them to keep it.

Really important information would be curated in "national interest datasets", overseen by a national data custodian who would report to the parliament.

But that's just half of it. Right now, in spite of a widespread belief to the contrary, you and I don't have access to our own data.

If I ask my music streaming service for details of my listening habits, or my search engine for details of my search history, or my insurer for details of my claiming history, or my supermarket for details of my shopping history, or my electricity supplier for details of my usage history, they are perfectly entitled to refuse to hand them over. I might want to take them to a competitor.

Harris wants to enshrine in law my right to take them to a competitor. Even better, he wants my providers to hand them to the competitors or brokers I select at my direction. I probably wouldn't be able to make much sense of a machine-readable account of my electricity use, but a competitor would.

Suddenly, competition could really work. And it would cost almost nothing. There would be no privacy concerns because it could be released only at my direction. Harris would also give me the right to request edits or corrections to the data firms have on me, to be informed about their intentions to sell or pass it on, to be able to order them to stop collecting it (at the risk of losing the service) and to appeal automated decisions that deny me services or charge me more on the basis of it.

He is talking about a revolution. It's a revolution we ought to embrace and direct, rather than sit back and watch.

In The Age and Sydney Morning Herald

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ABS endangers the census by asking for names

Expect to hear lots about the census. From August 1 we will be getting letters advising us of our login codes instead of the traditional hand-delivered forms. The catchphrase is "get online on August 9".

But what we won't be told as loudly is that there's another more fundamental revolution planned for 2016. The Bureau of Statistics is going to keep our names.

The deal used to be that our answers were anonymous. The bureau got to find out where we lived, where we were born, who we worked for, what we got paid and what religion we subscribed to, but it didn't get to keep our names.

The census collected statistics rather than information on individuals (although it was extended 10 years ago when the bureau began to ask us about our exact date of birth rather than our age).

This provision of our names will be compulsory. At least that's what the bureau says, although it is hard to see what the legal basis it would have to prosecute someone who refused to hand over their name.

The Census and Statistics Act empowers it to direct people to provide "statistical information" and requires it to "publish the results of these statistical collections". Names aren't usually thought of as statistics, and there would be an outrage if the bureau actually published them. Bill McLennan, a former head of the bureau who helped rewrite the Census and Statistics Act in the early 1980s, says flatly that it doesn't have the authority to demand names.

The bureau says they will be stored separately from the rest of the census for up to four years and released only in an "anonymised" form for projects "approved by a senior-level committee and subject to strict security provisions". Those projects will link what the bureau knows about us from the census with other information authorities know about us, "in the public good".

I can think of any number of such worthwhile linkages in the public good. One would be linking the census to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme to find out what drugs are prescribed to people in what occupations and what family circumstances. Examples the bureau uses are weaker, including the better targeting of mental health services, something that could probably just as easily be done without names.

Tell the ABS this is the first you've heard of its decision to retain everyone's name and it'll scoff. It outlined it in a press release issued the Friday before Christmas with the misleadingly vague title of ABS response to Privacy Impact Assessment.

It conducted the privacy impact assessment itself and found that "retaining names and addresses for the purpose of richer and more-dynamic statistics and more-efficient statistical operations has very low risks to privacy, confidentiality and security". One of the risks it dismissed as low was "function creep" - a gradual increase in the use of names as more and more government agencies pressed the bureau to exapn its use of them.

In place of broad consultation (it appears not to have approached the Australian Privacy Foundation) it convened its own small focus groups. "In working through examples, focus groups were generally comfortable with the protections that the ABS would put in place," it says.

Which would be a change. The first time it put forward the idea in the lead-up to the 2006 census, it was rewarded with a damning (genuinely independent) privacy impact assessment by privacy expert Nigel Waters. It considered trying again in the lead-up to 2011 census but but was overruled by then Australian Statistician Brian Pink amid concern about a public backlash.

Since Pink left in 2014, the ABS has rumbled along in a leadership and oversight vacuum. He wasn't replaced for 11 months, during which time the bureau suffered appalling problems with its unemployment survey and drew up cost-saving plans to abandon the 2016 census and move to 10-year surveys rather than five.

Pink's successor, David Kalisch, flicked the switch to "go" only last May when the parliamentary secretary, Kelly O'Dwyer, managed to secure enough money to both upgrade the bureau's ageing aging computer system and retain the census.

Four months later O'Dwyer was promoted and replaced by Alex Hawke who has just been promoted and replaced by ... well this week no one was quite sure, but the census will probably become the responsibility of the Treasurer, Scott Morrison.

The daftest thing about the bureau's poorly communicated decision to retain and use our names is that it'll run alongside its existing "time capsule" program in which we are invited to give our consent for our details to be accessed in 99 years, but not before.

"Information is only kept for those persons who explicitly give their consent," the bureau's website assures us, somewhat redundantly. McLennan says what's planned is without doubt "the most significant invasion of privacy ever perpetrated on Australians by the ABS".

When the Crikey website wrote about it earlier this year, the ABS accused it of undermining the "complete public trust" it needed to conduct the census and get accurate rather than falsified information. It's making a good fist of it itself.

In The Age and Sydney Morning Herald

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Census: They've been quietly holding on to our names for years

The Bureau of Statistics has been quietly hanging on to the names it collects with the census to conduct studies, despite a public commitment to destroy them.

Australian statistician David Kalisch told Fairfax Media the Bureau had been keeping the names it collected for up to 18 months.

"They've done it under the guise of: 'this is while we are processing the data'," he said.

"They've done linkages, they've done other things. What's happening now is we are being more transparent about it."

The studies have been conducted despite a commitment on the ABS website that "name and address information will be destroyed once statistical processing has been completed".

They used the names and addresses on census forms to link the census answers to department of immigration records, to school enrolment records and to the Australian Early Development Index.

The names were destroyed only after the records were linked.

Separately, and without asking for consent, the Bureau has been tracking five per cent of the population (more than one million people) through what it calls the Australian Census Longitudinal Dataset.

It has been using the names on the forms to create "linkage keys", which enable it to follow respondents over time. Each census, the same name produces the same linkage key, enabling movements to be tracked. Once each key has been created, the name itself has been destroyed. It is impossible to reverse-engineer a key to derive the name.

"In 2016, I have decided to keep names and addresses for longer," Mr Kalisch writes in today's Sydney Morning Herald and Age. "This will enable the ABS to produce statistics on important economic and social areas such as educational outcomes, and measuring outcomes for migrants."

Labelled by former Australian Statistician Bill McLennan "the most significant invasion of privacy ever perpetrated on Australians by the ABS," the decision will formalise what was happening informally before Mr Kalisch joined the ABS in 2014. It will extend the period for research using names from 18 months to four years. All names collected will be deleted by August 2020 or when studies have been completed, whichever is the soonest.

The decision is a retreat on a announcement in December that names and addresses on census forms would be retained indefinitely.

"There are extremely robust safeguards in place to protect the privacy and confidentiality of the information collected in the census, including names and addresses," Mr Kalisch writes in today's Fairfax Media publications. "The ABS never has and never will release identifiable census data."

Kat Lane, vice-chair of the Australian Privacy Foundation, said the real issue wasn't the ABS security system. It was that there was no justification for tracking or personally identifying Australians.

In The Age and Sydney Morning Herald

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They want to see your phone and internet records. Here's what they do

Did you know that the Australian government accesses someone's phone or internet records on average once every two minutes, every day,  every hour of the year?

The Global Mail reports:

"It happens all the time – roughly 800 times a day, on last year’s records.

Somewhere in Australia, a government bureaucrat – no-one especially senior; say, a Centrelink agent – fills in a form, gets a signature from someone else in the department, and becomes authorised to check out a member of the public’s phone records (which numbers that person has called, how long they spoke, and where they were when they placed the call), and then their email history (who they’ve emailed, and when, and the IP addresses used).

No warrant required, no notice given. It’s all legal – and has been happening since 2007.

In fact it happened more than 300,000 times in 2011-12. It may have happened to you – and in most cases, you wouldn’t know."


But what does one of the requests look like?

The NewYorker provides a clue.

The US dolcument is so extraordinary that I have published it as a pdf below.

I find it chilling. Especially the bit about the phone company admitting to no-one it has betrayed its customers:

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How to rob a bank. Ask nicely.

Want to get access to someone else's financial transaction records? There's an even money chance their bank will help you do it.

In November the customer experience research firm Global Reviews phoned call centre operators at eight of Australia's leading banks including each of the big four.

Without identifying themselves as researchers in 20 calls to each bank they asked how they could get access to their friend or partner's account.

In all cases the first answer was that it was against the rules. But when pressed, call centre staff became more co-operative.

"The callers would say things like, my girlfriend needs to transfer money today, she's gone to work, I have to do it for her, she'll kill me when I come home tonight" said managing partner Peter Grist.

"Half the time after saying no the call centre staff would work with the caller to find out ways to do it."

Usually the method involved using internet or telephone banking and details such as account numbers and dates of birth that would be known to estranged or current partners...

Staff at the ANZ bank were significantly less keen to advise on how to break the rules than staff at the other banks.

When results from the ANZ are excluded the proportion of call centre staff prepared to advise strangers how to access customers accounts climbs to two thirds.

An extraordinary 15 per cent were prepared to go further.

"They said if the caller was worried about how to go on line and do it, they would stay on the phone and guide them through it. They don't illegally enter accounts themselves, but they do guide other people through how to do it."

"I was astounded that so many call centre operators would get so actively involved in helping someone break the rules. What didn't astound me was their desire to help. There's a massive drive for customer satisfaction. It is drilled into them," said Mr Grist.

"They weren't trying to be fraudulent. They knew the rules. But human beings like to help. And not just in banks. I think it would be the same in any industry."

Former Privacy Commissioner Malcolm Crompton whose consultancy helped fund the survey said what the banks and Vodafone had in common was their vulnerability to social engineering.

"Someone rings up and is incredibly nice and it is hard not to help. They get one bit of information from one call centre operator and use it to get more from another."

Where the two differ is that Vodafone apparently had no limits on how much information one operator could access. "What's needed are geographical limits, so that one shop can't get easy access to records from interstate, and category limits so that someone setting up an account doesn't have access to call records," he said.

Each of the banks surveyed has been sent a copy of a copy of the results. Mr Grist said they were surprised.

Getting around the rules

The chance you'll be helped out

Bank of Queensland 57%
St George 55%
Commonwealth 54%
National Australia 49%
Westpac 42%
ANZ 18%

Banking privacy benchmark, Global Reviews, Information Integrity Solutions

Published in today's SMH and Age


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Freedom of information - Vodafone style

Vodafone faces compensation payouts to as many as 4 million of its customers after confirming it is investigating a security breach that has put billing and call records on a publicly accessible website protected only by passwords that change monthly.

It also faces the prospect of privacy concerns being added to a lawsuit being prepared by on behalf of 12,500 customers over quality of service issues.

Justice Minister Brendan O’Connor yesterday raised the matter with the office of the Privacy Commissioner which will seek answers from Vodafone today.

Commissioner Timothy Pilgrim has power to launch a so-called "own motion" investigation on behalf of affected customers and direct that compensation be paid to each.

At issue will be whether Vodafone has logged attempts to access its data and knows which of its customers have been affected.

"It appears what has happened is that somebody shared a password"... Vodafone chief executive Nigel Dews told the Herald.

"It appears to be a one-off breach and we have got out internal investigators looking into it right now. We reset our passwords last night and we are resetting them every 24 hours until that investigation is complete."

Vodfaone merged with mobile provider '3' two years ago, but only Vodafone customers were affected by the breach.

The firm would lay criminal charges against anyone who had passed on passwords.

Mr Dews declined to say whether Vodafone kept logs of every access, saying he did not want to hand out information that could help hackers.

Telstra too said it would not disclose the nature of its security measures. It is believed to use the same customer management system as Vodafone although it may be configured differently.

A reporter for the Sun Herald had someone with a laptop and login code demonstrate how easy it was to call to call up her address, drivers licence number, date of birth and details of the time, location and destination of all of her phone calls and messages.

'I was surprised how easily the database could be opened'

Natalie O'Brien

SITTING in a western Sydney business with a laptop and someone who knew a login for Vodafone's customer database, I handed over my mobile number to be punched in - in seconds we could see all my personal details.

For some time I have been told information about telco customers could easily be accessed.

I have heard many stories of how undesirable elements could get the passwords to tap into anyone's phone account and gather confidential details as well as watch all their transactions including who they contact.

But I was surprised at how quickly and easily the customer database could be opened from anywhere by someone unconnected to Vodafone. I could see my full name, address, driver's licence number, date of birth, the pin number to access and change details on my Vodafone account.

My entire call list - everyone I had rung or texted and the time I spent on the phone - was visible.

University of NSW law professor Graham Greenleaf told the Herald if Vodafone did not keep such logs there would be no obvious limit on the number of its customers to whom it could be liable if its conduct was found to breach the Privacy Act.

"Where more than one person is affected they can declare it a representative complaint," he said.

"The Privacy Commissioner can order the payment of compensation. If the firm does not pay, he can take it to court."

Until now no Privacy Commissioner has used that power in the decade they have had jurisdiction over private companies.

"It sends a bad message - that compliance with the Act is optional," he said.

The Privacy Act requires private companies to take reasonable precautions to protect personal data.

"What is reasonable depends on the risks and the nature of the information, but common sense would tell you there is a real question if you are potentially exposing this sort of information to people who can access it not just from Vodafone offices but from remote sites."

Any Vodafone customer is entitled to ask when and to whom the firm has disclosed their information.

"That's just accessing your own record under Privacy Act," he said. The Act also allowed the equivalent of a private class action.

Piper Alderman lawyer Sasha Ivantsoff will this week mail 12,500 Vodafone customers a questionnaire and says he may extend a planned law suit if their responses detail privacy breaches.

"The main issues to date have been dropped calls, no service, voice mail not functioning and data not functioning. We haven't filed anything yet, so we can adjust our claim," he said.

Published in today's SMH and Age


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The Australian does not follow a party line

Want proof?

A fortnight ago The Australian decided to unmask blogger Grog's Gamut, making a campaign of it.

His blog post that day was his last. (So far)

His final tweet was a retweet from James Massola, the just-hired journalist at The Australian's Canberra bureau who outed him:

RT jamesmassola @GrogsGamut should keep blogging - http://bit.ly/93topu

Sadly ironic, hey?

James and his employer knew it would get Grogs in trouble with his employer - the public service. They as good as boasted about it.

Here's Massola in courageous mode:

"So why did I out Grog if I thought he should keep blogging?

As a prolific blogger and tweeter, Jericho was putting information in the public domain to provoke discussion and debate. It might have been a hobby, but by engaging directly via Twitter with dozens of journalists, Jericho and his views became part of the public debate - and in an age in which the dissemination of information has been democratised, his scribblings had an influence.

But there is a catch to this democratisation. With political influence comes responsibility and the need for accountability, in the same way that journalists are accountable for what they write, tweet and broadcast.

Jericho was anonymous, and public interest in his identity was growing parallel to his influence. In my view - and in the view of this newspaper - the fact he had a partisan point of view, worked in the public service and wrote about his department was a matter of public interest."

What was that James?

"With political influence comes responsibility and the need for accountability, in the same way that journalists are accountable for what they write, tweet and broadcast."

But never accuse The Australian of groupthink.

Because come Monday a week ago there was Henry Thornton, "the nom-de-plume of an eminent independent economist" writing his usual column, a day ahead of the monthly Reserve Bank board meeting.

Look at the snapshot above, click on the link. He gets to keep his identity blurred and gets to keep his day job.

Thornton tries to influence the Reserve Bank board for heavens sake! For all I know he is a director of a public company beholden to banks. As James would say, "his scribblings have an influence".

I do not think he should be outed, but you would think The Australian would if it took itself seriously.

It squashed Grogs because it could. I think it is protecting Henry Thornton precisely because it knows he is actually a person of influence, who it needs.

Oh, and he is conservative as well. Maybe that makes a difference.

In fact the Australian has a long history of using pseudonames, as Restless Capital outlines.

Martin Collins, for years unidentified, took his first name from Martin Place in Sydney and his second name from Collins Street in Melbourne.

Julie Posetti reports that some of The Australian's staff members are phoning the employers of pseudonymous bloggers in an apparent at intimidation.

Hope not. At least Thornton's safe.

The last word - for now - goes to the perceptive Sceptic Lawyer, who herself has a history of pseudonames:

"I dislike the cut-rate conservatism The Australian offers as representative of my side of politics"

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No-one should be forcibly reduced to a single identity

Yes, this is a post about #groggate, #massolagate

I have several identities. I have one identity picking up my children at school, another at church, another when I buy a bus ticket, another at work, and so on.

Most of us do.

I wouldn't matter if I used a different name for each. All the bus company needs to know is that I am the person who paid for the ride. The prepaid ticket suffices, no need for a name there. (Bizarrely NSW tollways go further, wanting to know my credit card details and address in a classic example of overreach - the fact that I had bought a prepaid beeper ought to be enough).

Married women often use different names for different purposes, as is their right.

Human beings have two needs when it comes to identity. One is the need to interact with other people, names help here. The other is the need to keep our wholeness to ourselves, not letting everyone know everything about us helps here.

The energy company AGL doesn't get this. It not only demands date of birth info but also a drivers licence number (in defiance of NSW law) in order to get the gas on, not figuring that I would prefer to keep that between myself and the Roads and Traffic Authority.

Many people don't mind being reduced to only one identity, they have no problem with AGL. But many people do mind. No-one should be forcibly reduced to a single identity. It infringes what I and others believe to be a fundamental right - to only share with others what is needed in order to achieve what we want to achieve.

"Outing" homosexuals to their employers breaches this right. "Outing" a blogger using a pseudonym such as Grogs Gammut to his employer breaches this right.

George Orwell warned of a world in which this routinely happened. News Corporation believes in it. Phone taps, anyone?

James Massola's defence of his action in stripping bare Grogs Gammut is here. He asks "So why did I out Grog if I thought he should keep blogging?", fails to provide a compelling reason and then adds wistfully "I don't want him to lose his job."

Stephen Spencer of Channel 10 (who has other identities in other contexts like us all) writes:

It serves the interests of the gallery and various news outlets. He's silenced and anyone else who speaks out is now on notice.

I agree. For the record, I will never give away the other identities and occupations of the pseudonymous bloggers who routinely interact with me. I am deeply saddened.


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You use Facebook?

Try to get out, if you can.

Here's Minister Conroy's extraordinary assessment at Senate estimates:


"Facebook has also shown a complete disregard for users’ privacy recently. Facebook,
I understand, was developed by Harvard University student, Mark Zuckerberg, who
after breaking up with his girlfriend developed a website of all the photos from the Harvard yearbook so that
he and his mates could rank the girls according to their looks — an auspicious start for Facebook. He was
encouraged to develop this further and Facebook, the social networking phenomenon, was born. Facebook has
been rolling out changes to its privacy laws over recent months and as one blogger recently put it:

Facebook has gone rogue. Facebook used to be a place to share photos and thoughts with friends and family, a useful
way to keep in touch. Then Facebook realised it owned the network and decided to turn your profile into your identity
online, figuring rightly that there is money and power in being the place where people define themselves.

These are all quotes from this blog.

In December last year Facebook reneged on its privacy promises and made much of your profile public by default,
including the city you live in, your name, your photo, the names of your friends and the causes you have signed on to.
Then it went further and linked all the things you said you liked to your public profile; your music preferences,
employment information, reading preference, schools—all made public.

Fourteen privacy groups have filed an unfair trade complaint against Facebook with the FTC. Facebook’s
founder, Mark Zuckerberg, says privacy is no longer a social norm. A leaked email from Mr Zuckerberg
recently referred to Facebook users — and I will have to censor this because we are in parliament — as dumb,
and then the next word begins with ‘f’, for giving him all their private information and not expecting him to
use it.

So, what would you prefer, Senator Wortley, a corporate giant who is answerable to no-one and motivated
solely by profit making the rules on the internet, or a democratically elected government with all the checks
and balances in place?"


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What do you do if you're a bureaucrat attempting to win reelection?

You tick all the boxes.

You know, "population"...

Today's is welfare fraud. This morning's press release from Chris Bowen (below) is sickening.

And it promulgates a newish euphemism - "optical surveillance"

Expect more. Expect worse.


CHRIS BOWEN MP
MINISTER FOR HUMAN SERVICES
MINISTER FOR FINANCIAL SERVICES, SUPERANNUATION & CORPORATE LAW

MEDIA RELEASE
5 April 2010
GOVERNMENT CRACKING DOWN ON WELFARE FRAUD WITH OPTICAL SURVEILLANCE

The Minister for Human Services, Chris Bowen MP, today announced the Government is enhancing its optical surveillance processes as part of a crackdown on fraudulent welfare claims.

DSP claimants who falsely claim to have a medical condition which prevents them from working and who have been observed undertaking physical activity that contradicts this will soon be required to have further medical assessment by an independent medical practitioner.

“The Government has asked Centrelink to enhance its use of covert optical surveillance of DSP customers suspected of welfare fraud to ensure that people misrepresenting their medical circumstances can no longer rip off the Australian taxpayer,” Mr Bowen said.

“This action is about ensuring the integrity of Australia’s welfare system and the Disability Support Pension payment.

“Those who genuinely need access to the DSP should be able to do this without the odium of those deliberately seeking to abuse the payment.”

During the 2008-09 financial year, Centrelink completed 1,570 investigations into suspected welfare fraud where surveillance was used during the investigation.

This resulted in debts of $21,369,095 being identified for recovery action and estimated annual savings of $5,623,618 as a result of reductions to ongoing customer payments.

Meanwhile, the Child Support Agency (CSA) is also ramping up its use of optical surveillance to ensure parents meet their obligations.

“Increasing optical surveillance will enhance the CSA’s investigative capabilities and add significant value to its range of collection and litigation options,” Mr Bowen said.

“Parents who don’t do the right thing will be caught and will have to face the consequences, including being referred to the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions or relevant state police service for prosecution action in some cases.”

In July 2008, the CSA established a 12-month trial to use covert optical surveillance to support investigations into a limited number of serious cases.

Following an evaluation of this trial in June 2009, the Government decided that covert optical surveillance would permanently form part of the CSA’s toolkit for investigating serious cases of child support non compliance and fraud.

“This should serve as a warning to people who seek to evade their obligations that they will face the prospect of prison time and court fines, as well as having to repay their debt,” Mr Bowen said.

Media Contact – Laura Stevens 0432 833 769

ATTACHMENT

Centrelink: State-by-state breakdown of optical surveillance cases 2008-09

State or Territory
Total
ACT
39
New South Wales
453
Northern Territory
17
Queensland
355
South Australia
248
Tasmania
44
Victoria
321
Western Australia
92
Other
1
Total
1,570

Centrelink: Optical surveillance case studies

Queensland

On 3 April 1995, Mr X lodged a claim for Disability Support Pension under a false name. At the time of making the claim Mr X produced false documentation and identification to Centrelink, formerly the Department of Social Security. This resulted in Mr X receiving Disability Support Pension payments that he was not entitled to. The Australian Federal Police executed a search warrant on Mr X’s residence in June 2007 and evidence was seized to support the allegation. A brief of evidence was referred to the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions (CDPP). The CDPP charged Mr X with three counts under section 29D of the Crimes Act 1914 and three counts under section 134.2 of the Criminal Code Act 1995. The total charge amount was $147,861.11. Mr X was sentenced in the Southport Magistrates Court on 24 October 2008 to 36 months in prison with a no parole period of 10 months. Upon release Mr X was placed on a good behaviour bond for the remaining 26 months with a self surety of $500.

Victoria

Surveillance was used to assist in gathering sufficient evidence to prove that a 62-year-old Victorian woman had, for over 11 years, been living as a member of a couple. During this period the woman had intentionally misrepresented her circumstances to Centrelink as single in order to obtain the maximum single rate of Disability Support Pension, receiving over $80,000 in payments to which she was not entitled. As a result of this investigation, she was convicted in February 2010 of two offences and sentenced to two concurrent periods of imprisonment of 18 and 15 months, to be released after six months upon entering into recognisance to be of good behaviour for two years and ordered to make reparation of the amount overpaid.

NSW

Surveillance was used to assist in gathering sufficient evidence to prove that an 81-year-old woman had, for almost 20 years, been in receipt of dual Age Pension payments, receiving almost $200,000 in payments to which she was not entitled. As a result of this investigation, she was convicted in January 2010 and sentenced to two concurrent periods of imprisonment of two years and 18 months to be released after six months upon entering into recognisance orders to be of good behaviour for the balance of the sentences.


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MYEFO - Repaint the debt truck!

Here's me in the National Times:

Treasurer Wayne Swan had held a sit-down press conference in Canberra complete with Power Points.

His shadow Joe Hockey held a stand-up "doorstop interview" at the back of NSW Parliament House. And the Opposition's Debt Truck was no-where to be seen.

Perhaps it was in for a paint job.

When last taken out for a spin it had "Labor's Debt bombshell - $315 billion" written on the side.

Always a piece of sophistry - the $315 billion was the meaningless gross figure rather than the more useful net figure - it's now not even in the ballpark.

The Mid-Year Budget update has net government debt peaking at $153 billion rather than the $203 billion expected at budget time.

Divide that by each man woman and child in the country and you get... well not the kind of burden you would have, because annual GDP is also set to be some $50 billion higher than it was going to be.

Yes.

Much of the expected debt simply won't be run up, and it will be easier to repay.

That's what happens when swift action to stop the economy stalling has what the Treasurer calls a "greater than expected impact".

Continued at National Times

The economy will grow this financial year rather than sliding as expected at budget time. Unemployment will peak at a not-too-bad 6.75 per cent mid next year instead of the expected 8.5 per cent. Future budget deficits are set to be up to half what was expected.

Too good to be true? Well it is true the Treasurer didn't expect it. His measures have worked better than he thought they would (and so did China's, just as importantly).

But it isn't true that he and the Treasury were deliberately pessimistic in May in order bring us better news now. Just about everyone was pessimistic in May, scared even. Most commentators believed the Treasury was underplaying how bad things were going to get, as Wayne Swan enthusiastically pointed out today, metaphorically waving at a pile of Budget newspaper clippings.

We're on our way out of the woods, but it'll be bumpy. Every one of the stimulus measures had an end date, and as they end we will feel the bumps.

The bumps will be made harder by the Treasurer's pledge to bank future unexpected increases in revenue. Taken literally the pledge means that next year's government election promises will be fully funded.

It'll repeat that. Taken literally the pledge means an austere election campaign, and an austere five or so years. As we should be in the aftermath of the cash splash.

The Coalition is promising austerity too. At the back of the NSW parliament Joe Hockey pointed to $4 billion of cost overruns identified in the Mid-year update, and implied they wouldn't happen if he was Treasurer.

Lets hope not.

Hockey himself had trouble managing taxpayers' money as Human Services Minister in the last government, spending millions promoting the so-called Access Card and actually calling for tenders before the Senate approved legislation it subsequently let lapse.

But if he and Wayne Swan are in favour of austerity now, that's good. We'll need it as the recovery takes hold.

Related Posts

. Ken Henry's devastating question to Senators

. The Coalition Debt Truck: Running on empty

. The Access Card is a complete mess, buried but still belching up toxic smoke

. Joe Hockey - where angels fear to tread

Read more >>

Joe Hockey - where angels fear to tread

Ian Verrender writes in Saturday's Sydney Morning Herald:

"Sticking your neck out can be a dangerous business. Professional gamblers offset their bets, financial types hedge their investments and politicians usually err on the side of caution by never actually answering a question.

But sometimes a pollie goes out on a limb. Take this little missive to a constituent from Joe Hockey, the federal member for North Sydney who this week was elevated to the role of Opposition spokesman on Treasury.

Dear Mr M…

Thank you for your letter of 12 August, 2007 concerning the global finance system.

I have noted your views. I however disagree vehemently with your analysis that the world is facing a collapse of the financial markets. The last few days have indicated that the financial markets, with the support of the central banking institutions, are able to meet the demands that have been placed on them.

Yours sincerely, Joe Hockey.


Oops. August 2007 was the beginning of the greatest meltdown in financial markets that the world has ever seen. August 2007 was when credit markets froze completely and the Australian sharemarket officially went into a "correction", a 10 per cent fall.

In Hockey's defence, no one could have foreseen the extent of the collapse..."

Hockey was busy at the time.

Fresh from questionable administration of a $1 billion plus information technology project, he was ducking and weaving in an attempt to sell WorkChoices.

Ross Gittins has some advice for him in his new role.

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Tuesday column: The Access Card is a complete mess, buried but still belching up toxic smoke.

The Prime Minister says Labor's industrial relations plan is "cobbled together". Compared to his own government's plan for an Australian Access Card, it is a model of due process.

Both plans will, if implemented, limit our rights and create obligations way into the future. And as it happens both involve the one of the Prime Minister's favourite right-hand men Joe Hockey.

Before his current job as the Minister and attack dog for industrial relations (he says Labor's policy is an ugly nightmare) Joe Hockey was in put charge of developing a $1 billion plus information technology project, that also involved social engineering.

He cut corners...

On taking over the human services portfolio in 2004 he inherited a cautious limited trial of a Medicare smart-card underway in Tasmania which he disparaged, declaring that pilots were “for planes, not for technology in my view”.

He called for tenders for two Access Card projects each worth hundreds of millions of dollars ahead of submitting the legislation to parliament (a process that caught the attention of the Audit Office) and spent $3 million advertising the proposed new card through agencies including George Patterson and Young & Rubicam.

His department hired a public relations consultant to promote the card on a contract worth $580,000 and a "branding consultant" on $100,000. A Senate estimates hearing heard that 18 departmental staff were working full-time on communications strategy for the card.

All this was before any of the legislation approving the card had been passed by the Senate, and before all of the legislation had even been written.

It is an approach that created moments of farce.

During the Senate inquiry this March the ACT’s Kate Lundy asked Christopher Cook, an executive with one of the firms tendering to build the card Computer Sciences Corporation about the performance indicators in the tender documents. Cook replied that he was bound by confidentiality. While Lundy could ask, he could not answer.

Hockey commissioned the accounting firm KPMG to prepare a business case for the card, which he promised to release, and then released only edited highlights. When the Australian Democrats tried to obtain the full document under Freedom of Information laws Hockey’s department said it would cost them $867.23.

To reassure the public that its interests were being taken into account Hockey set up a task force chaired by Allan Fels AO. It recommended that the Minister reconsider putting a photo on the face of the card and that he not put on it a signature or a unique identify number.

Hockey decided that the card needed all three.

When the government’s own Privacy Commissioner raised similar concerns citing an increased risk of identity fraud Hockey remained unmoved.

By the time a Senate Committee dominated by his own side of politics called for the whole thing to be sent back to the drawing board (a very rare occurrence) Hockey had been parachuted out of the portfolio.

His successor Ian Campbell lasted only weeks, resigning over an unrelated matter. His successor Chris Ellison was in the job only months before the departmental secretary who had driven the project was moved on.

It is easy to get the feeling that plans for an Access Card have been on a sort-of autopilot since then, in large measure because several private sector firms have already spent millions preparing tenders for a scheme that has yet to get parliamentary approval.

The latest Minister Chris Ellison has continued to reject calls from the government’s Privacy Commissioner, its Access Card taskforce and the senate committee to leave important personal information off the face of the card, and has said that if the Coalition gets back he wants the legislation passed.

His latest draft of that legislation attempts to placate them with reassurances that seem nonsensical. It states explicitly that “access cards are not to be used as, and are not to become, national identity cards” but no-where does it define what it means by the term national identity card. It says that “an individual owns his or her access card” but neglects to say what it means by the term ownership, other than to make it clear that people can’t sell their cards or get access to all of the information written inside them.

If Alan Fels is worried, if the government’s Privacy Commissioner is worried, and if a Coalition-dominated Senate Committee is worried, should we be?

After all most of us have absolutely nothing to hide.

Why not take Hockey and his successors at their word and get a card that we can use to absolutely prove our identity for Medicare and Centrelink purposes?

For two reasons:

One is that as soon as our photos, signatures and unique identifying numbers (along with our dates of birth if we wish) are printed on the face of the card it effectively becomes a universal identity card.

If you don’t believe me, think about our driver’s licences. In a number of states including NSW it is illegal for anyone not connected with the roads and traffic administration to demand to see your licence or be told your licence number.

But almost every organisation that wants to find out who you are asks for one. Try dealing with ActewAGL without one.

It will be illegal under the Access Card regime as well for unauthorized people to demand to see the card (with enforcement via on-the-spot fines) but it will happen.

In any event it WILL be legal for bars, telephone companies, banks and the like to request the “voluntary” production of the card.

When the Access Card becomes near-universally accepted, as such a high-quality identity document is likely to be, it’ll become valuable to identity thieves.

And guess what? The signature they need to forge and the face they need to match will be printed on the face of the card.

A really secure card would only have the photograph and perhaps the signature recorded on the secure computer chip inside the card, making the card itself useless to most identity thieves and useful only for the purposes that the government says it is needed for.

That’s what the government’s friends and appointed experts have been telling it. They want a card that will work, not one that was cobbled together early by an enthusiast who put the project out for tender without approval leaving his successors uncomfortable about backing out.

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It's back!!! Australia's Access Card returns.

Infringement notices will be part of a new armory of weapons proposed by the government to ensure that its planned Access Card is not used improperly.

The Human Minister Chris Ellison yesterday released an exposure draft of the government’s revised Access Card Bill, prepared after the earlier one was withdrawn in the wake of a hostile report by a Senate Committee.

The new draft Bill resubmits many of the proposals criticised by the committee including the display of identifying information including names, photographs, ID numbers and signatures on the face of the card.

The Committee suggested that including this information on the face of the card when it would already be digitally embedded in the card would encourage its use as a general identification document outside of the government...

The draft bill says that it will be illegal for anyone not associated with the provision of government benefits to demand that the card be produced as evidence of identity.

In an attempt to make this restriction more enforceable it proposed a system of infringement notices enabling fines to be imposed on people such as nightclub bouncers or call centre operators who demanded production of the card of the use of its ID number.

The director of the No ID Card Campaign Anna Johnston said last night that the bill was effectively unchanged and ridden with loopholes.

The card could still be requested as identification by private service providers – it just could not be “required”.

“And government officials from police officers to bus drivers to social workers will be able to demand production of the card. Indeed, immigration officials have already suggested that the card could be used to identify missing or detained persons – a purpose unrelated to the delivery of health or welfare benefits”.

She said banks already planed to use the Access Card as part of the “100 points of ID” system to monitor financial transactions. The only way to stop the card becoming an all-purpose identification card was to “remove the features that make it an all-purpose ID card.”

The Minister has asked for comments on the exposure draft by 21 August.

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How out government treats our parliament with contempt, throwing out dollars like confetti along the way.

The government has spent $1 million on focus groups and market research in order to develop a communications policy to promote its Access Card, the legislation for which it has withdrawn from the Senate.

The total contract with Orima Research is valued at $2.3 million.

In addition the government has spent $3 million advertising the yet-to-be-legislated card through the agencies George Patterson Y&R and Eardrum and has set aside an extra $2.5 million to spend on advertising in the remaining weeks of this financial year. Next financial year's advertising spend is budgeted at $8.3 million.

The advertising is classified as an "information awareness program" rather than an "active campaign".

The department responsible to for the card, Human Services, has also hired a public relations consultant to promote the card on a contract worth $580,000 and just weeks before a Senate Committee recommended that the legislation be withdrawn hired a "branding consultant" on a contract worth more than $100,000...

A Senate estimates hearing was told yeterday that 18 departmental staff are working full-time on communications strategy for the card.

In March a scathing report by a Senate Committee half of whose members are Liberal Party senators recommended that the government withdraw the legislation and start again.

At the time two tenders were underway to build different parts of the Card's information technology system.

The Minister Senator Ellison will introduce a replacement bill in June.

He has indicated that it will still require the card to display a photograph, signature and personal identity number, despite the Committee's finding that there was no need for such a requirement and that it would lead to the card becoming a defacto Australian identitification card.

The Access card is intended to replace the Medicare and other benefits cards.

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Sunday dollars+sense: Do Not Call... unless the price is right

HT: Joshua Gans.

Thrilled about the new Do Not Call register?

I know I am. All you need to do is go to www.donotcall.gov.au, put in your details and no one will ever be able to call you out of the blue to sell you something again. (Apart from companies with whom you have a pre-existing relationship, the government, charities, churches, educational institutions and market researchers. Oh yes, and political parties.)

It’s good, but it could be better...

And I don’t only mean by closing the rather obvious loopholes. I mean by allowing calls where you charge per minute for your time.

I’ll explain.

Marketing phone calls and door to door selling are actually unusual. They are attempts to grab your time without paying for it.

In other circumstances marketeers are prepared to dearly to have just 30 seconds of your attention. How much do you think television and radio commercials cost? How much do you think an ad in the Canberra Times costs (except for the free classifieds on Tuesdays)?

Looked at another way commercial television itself is a means of paying us for our time. And what an elaborate means! We are delivered often exceptionally high-quality programs in return for the hope that we will look at a few ads.

Google and newspaper websites work the same way. We are delivered amazingly useful services on the off chance that an ad will attract our attention.

Our one-on-one attention over the phone should be worth much more. And worth even more if we have become especially attentive because we are being paid for it.

Ian Ayres and Barry Nalebuff, two economists from Yale University have worked out how it could be done. (You won’t be surprised to know that their book is entitled “Why Not?”)

Households that sign up for the Do Not Call registry could be given the right to authorise their phone company to connect certain calls that meet their quoted price, or prices.

If you want next to no calls you could set the fee at, say, $1,000 a minute. If, for instance, you enjoy taking part in surveys you could charge those callers only 10 cents a minute.

You would gain real control of your own time. Real control means the right to buy and sell.

Direct sellers are likely to jump at the chance, and pay us what they owe us.

Ian Ayres and Barry Nalebuff, Want to Call Me? Pay Me! The Wall Street Journal October 8, 2003

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Saturday Forum: How on earth did the Medicare card nearly morph into a universal national ID card?

Tensions are raw within the Government over its stalled plans to turn the Medicare card into an Access Card.

A scheme that the government said was essential for Australia, on which it has already spent millions of dollars and encouraged the private sector to spend millions more, has been blocked by four of the government's own senators.

In a unanimous recommendation on Thursday the Senate’s Finance and Public Administration Committee asked the government to withdraw the Access Card legislation already passed through the House of Representatives and start again.

It is a sign of how seriously the Minister Chris Ellison takes the Committee’s report that within an hour he had agreed...

As the Opposition Access Card spokeswoman Tanya Plibersek put it on Friday: “Seldom do Coalition senators make recommendations that are critical of a government program, let alone multiple critical recommendations... but the Access Card is so bad they have swallowed their fears and spoken out.”

Right now the Liberals on the Committee are lying low, not wanting to inflame passions further.

As it happens, the Chair of the Committee, Queensland Liberal senator Brett Mason, is an expert on privacy law. A barrister and an academic before joining the Senate he wrote his PhD thesis on privacy, and last year published a book entitled Privacy Without Principle: The Use and Abuse of Privacy in Australian Law and Public Policy.

Launching the book in Parliament House in March Mason’s friend and Canberra flat mate Peter Costello said the Senator knew “more about privacy than practically anybody else in this building.”

Also active in the inquiry was the ACT’s Labor Senator Kate Lundy along with three other Labor senators, three other Liberals, and Senator Andrew Murray of the Australian Democrats.

All supported the recommendation that the legislation go back to the drawing board and throughout the inquiry all worked as a team trying to come to grips with what the government was doing in a very tight time frame.

The government didn’t make it easy for them. The literature it presented to the Committee implied that a new-generation Access Card would cut welfare fraud by between $1.6 billion and $3 billion, but these figures were over 10 years and they were not net of the very substantial costs of setting up and running the card system. The Australian Privacy Foundation told the committee the government could get a better return by putting the access card expenditure in the bank.

And the committee found it impossible to work out how the $1.6 billion dollar figure had been arrived at. It was told only that the accounting firm KPMG had arrived at the number and that the details could not be disclosed.

When it asked a representative of one of the companies bidding to build the scheme to tell it how many new cards it could add to the scheme in a day the representative replied: “You can ask, but we can’t answer”. He had signed a deed of confidentiality with the government that prevented him from providing those details to the Senate.

Two tenders to build different parts of the Access Card system were underway at the same time as the the Committee was conducting its investigation and before the legislation had been approved by the Senate. In understated language the Committee reported that the government’s action “could be seen as undermining the authority of the Committee by creating the impression that passage of this legislation is preordained, rendering Senate oversight superfluous”.

The reason why the scheme was so urgent had never been made clear. As one Committee member exclaimed in frustration: “Where’s the fire?”

At the heart of the scheme proposed by the government was an unresolved conundrum. On one hand the government insisted that new card was to be used only for the purpose of replacing the existing Medicare and Commonwealth benefits cards. Under no circumstances was it to become a national identification card. The Minister introducing the Bill even described the bill as an “anti-ID card Bill”.

On the other hand every detail about the design of the card appeared to facilitate it becoming a national ID card.

In its unanimous report the Committee mocked the “well-intentioned” clause in the legislation that specified a five-year jail term for anyone who demanded the card as proof of ID. It said the penalty attempted to criminalise behaviour that was “an almost inevitable consequence” of the card’s design.

“It is logically questionable for the government to create a document that can serve perfectly as a high quality identity document, and then to penalise those in the private sector who would want to use it for precisely that purpose,” the Committee reported.

“It will be entirely logical for persons whose job entails requiring proof of identity to prefer the most authoritative and high quality document possible. So from nightclub bouncer to airline check-in clerk, the temptation to ask for the access card as a form of ID will only be exceeded by the willingness of individual Australian citizens to produce that same document in the face of such a request.”

The Committee said it was easy to envisage a scenario whereby after almost universal registration for the card, the penalty for private use was demonstrated to be both ineffective and excessively punitive.

“There will be widespread pressure on the government from a business community that is highly dependent upon reliable identification documents to repeal the dead letter, draconian prohibition against requiring the access card for that purpose,” it predicted.

In fact, the Committee noted that the Australian Bankers Association had already asked it to delete the five-year jail term during its hearing in Melbourne.

Individually, the Committee members were not necessarily against the idea of a universal national identification card, particularly in an era of heightened security concerns. Mason’s own book makes the point that no-one has an absolute “right” to privacy in modern times.

But the government’s problem and the Committee’s problem was that the government deliberately decided not to make the case for a national identification card. It kept saying that the card was designed only to replace the Medicare and Commonwealth benefit cards.

Every time a representative of ASIO or the Federal Police told the Committee of the ways in which the card could be used for surveillance the Chair had to remind them that the government had explicitly said that the card was not intended for that purpose.

The Committee reported that while access to a single database covering the great majority of the Australian population complete with biometric facial recognition data “would no doubt greatly facilitate the work of the law enforcement and security agencies” it seemed to exceed what was required to achieve the stated objective of the bill.

In fact the stated objective of the bill and the design of the Access Card were poles apart.

The Committee found that in order to replace the Medicare and benefits cards all that was needed was a new generation high security card with the cardholder’s name on the front. No printed photo, no printed signature, no printed ID number. It would then be impossible for bouncers at hotels or call-centre staff at phone or gas utilities to ask for a number or ask to see the card. The piece of plastic would tell them nothing. Photographic and all sorts of other information including a representation of the cardholder’s signature could be embedded in the chip, but it would only be readable by the people authorized to read it.

That is actually a description of the card design recommended to the government by an advisory committee headed by the former head of the Competition Commission Professor Allan Fels. It rejected the recommendation.

The Committee also heard that for the Access Card to replace the existing 17 different cards used by different agencies there was no need for a new unique identification number. Each agency already had a number that could be stored in the ample space on the card’s chip and each agency was to store its information separately in its own data “silo”.

Using one unique number to identify each Australian for every government purpose would create the risk that “the ease of matching those records may in the future increase the temptation to change existing restrictions on information sharing between agencies and create the framework for large-scale data matching.”

The Committee heard as well that there was no need for the central database that administered the system to keep digital photographs of the original birth certificates and other documents that most Australian adults would submit in order to get the card. Keeping them on file, after a card had been granted would turn the central database into a “honey pot” for identity thieves and unauthorized access.

The Department of Human Services responded that it had a high degree of confidence in the security measures designed to protect the central database. The Committee noted that even if the database was completely secure when set up future technological advances were likely to present it with threats.

It was concerned as well that the bill before it appeared to allow the rules governing the storage of data to be changed administratively without further reference to parliament.

Imprecise wording in the bill also appeared to open the possibility of state government agencies gaining the right to use the access card without further parliamentary approval. All that was needed was for a Commonwealth agency to be “involved”.

The Committee surmised that the Commonwealth’s role in such things as deciding concession status for veterans might allow public transport providers such as the NSW railways to require veterans to show it their cards when getting on trains.

This “would further enhance the ubiquity of access card usage, and would
materially contribute to its emergence as the dominant identity document in day to day use through out Australia”.

At nearly every turn the Access Card architects appeared to insist on the retention and display of more rather than less information, on more rather than less latitude for the bureaucrats storing it, and on the creation of a unique national identification number for each Australian adult.

They also insisted that the creation of the card was urgent. So urgent that the process couldn’t wait for parliamentary approval. Or even for the drafting of the rest of the legislation.

The Human Services (Enhanced Service Delivery) Bill that would allow creation of the Access Card was only one of two planned pieces of legislation. The Senate had been asked to pass it before seeing the second bill which was to “deal with the review and appeal processes for administrative decisions, further elements of information protection and legislative issues relating to the use of the card, including in relation to dependents”.

The Committee concluded that it was being asked to approve the Access Card on “blind faith without full knowledge of the details or implications of the program”.

This was “inimical to good law-making and unlikely to encourage public confidence in the access card proposal, particularly as the missing measures are essential for providing the checks and balances needed to address serious concerns about the bill.”

The biggest mystery for the Committee members is how the whole thing happened.

Why did a government that insisted it was determined not to introduce a universal ID card fast-track legislation that was only half drafted and issue contracts ahead of parliamentary approval for a system that had all the makings of a universal ID card?

The best guess is that the Access Card began with good intentions. The magnetic striped Medicare card that lives in most of our wallets is now ancient. It is easy to read, easy to forge and in need of a technological update. From this worthwhile aim came a proposal that grew, and then continued to grow without effective ministerial oversight.

It didn’t help that the portfolio went through three ministers while the bill was being prepared for and shepherded through parliament.

The first, Joe Hockey was genuine technological enthusiast, which may not have helped when it came to rigorous skeptical oversight.

He was anxious to promote a personal data storage zone on the card’s chip that he described variously as being like an ipod, a car, and somewhere to store a shopping list.

There is no doubt that the use of an electronic chip on the Access Card opened up these possibilities, but they are uses that would have encouraged rather than discouraged its evolution into an all-purpose identification card.

There was also talk about the use of the personal area of the chip to store medical data even medial histories, but these plans were undeveloped at the time the legislation was presented to the Senate. They were downplayed by Joe Hockey’s successors.

Ian Campbell took on the portfolio after Joe Hockey was promoted, oversaw the introduction of the legislation to the House, and then resigned after admitting that he had met the Western Australian lobbyist Brian Burke.

His replacement Senator Chris Ellison barely had time to get up to speed before the Senate inquiry began.

The proposal was without continuing and effective Ministerial oversight during its most critical phase. It was pushed by the Office of Access Card in the Department of Human Services and developed a life of its own. If an agency such as Veterans Affairs or the Australian Federal Police insisted that a feature be added, it was. If the Office wanted to issue tenders ahead of parliamentary approval, it got its way.

The Access Card became a multi-humped, continuingly evolving and self-sustaining camel. If a government Minister of any strength had taken a hard look at what was evolving and measured it against the government’s stated objectives the Senate committee would never needed to have produced this week’s humiliating report.

As an exercise in public administration, ministerial oversight and parliamentary accountability the evolution of the Access Card is not a process the government can be proud of.

And yet what was being proposed – a database of biometric and other information on 16.5 million Australians – had the potential to become the Howard government’s most-remembered achievement.

By killing the Access Card bill this week the government members of the Finance and Public Administration Committee probably did the Howard government a favour (although it would be fair to say they are not being thanked for it at the moment).

The new Minister for Human Services Senator Ellison says he will examine the legislation afresh and then reintroduce a revised package in one part rather two later this year.

He may be dismayed at what he finds. Senator Ellison was an opponent of the less-intrusive Australia Card proposal put forward by the Hawke government in the mid-1980’s.

His office says he hopes to have the new bill ready by June. But even if he does, it is unlikely to pass into law before the election. Labor has promised not to proceed with the card. For the moment it is dead.

The private sector contractors who have spent millions of dollars preparing tenders to run the system at the encouragement of the Office of Access Card may well be angry. They shouldn’t be. Dealing with a government is always a risk, especially if it is acting ahead of an authorisation from its own parliament.
When after the last election the Coalition gained a majority in the Senate there were many who said it would mean an end to effective Senate oversight of what the government was doing. This week they were wrong, and four government Senators can take a lot of the credit.

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Great quotes

Seldom do Coalition senators make recommendations that are critical of a government program, let alone multiple critical recommendations ... but the Access Card is so bad they have swallowed their fears and spoken out.

Opposition Access Card spokeswoman Tanya Plibersek.
The Australian, March 16, 2007


Peter Debnam is running an amazing campaign and I think there's going to be a very strong reaction.

Pru Goward, Liberal candidate for Goulburn on her leader's performance in the NSW election.
AAP, March 15, 2007


Coles has always kept the market fully informed.

Sarah McNeil, Coles Group Corporate Affairs.
AM, March 16, 2007

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Like the Australia Card before it, the Access Card is dead... for now.

The government’s contentious Access Card legislation at present before the Senate is effectively dead. The Human Services Minister Chris Ellison last night agreed to withdraw and recast it in the wake of a scathing report by a Senate Committee half of whose members are Liberal Party senators.

The Human Services (Enhanced Service Delivery) Bill passed through the House of Representatives last month. The government had already issued two tenders for running the scheme and had planned to roll it out early next year. It is understood to have spent millions of dollars on the scheme on the assumption that it would be passed into law.

The Bill was to have been put to a vote in the Senate next week.

In a report tabled out of session late yesterday the Senate’s Finance and Public Administration Committee recommended that the entire scheme go back to the drawing board for redrafting.

The Committee, chaired by Queensland Liberal Senator Brett Mason complained that it had been asked to approve the scheme on “blind faith” without knowing what was to be in a second related piece of legislation yet to be drafted.

In strongly critical language it said that the fact that two tenders were taking place while it conducted its inquiry could be seen as undermining its authority “by creating the impression that passage of this legislation is preordained, rendering Senate oversight superfluous”...

The committee rejected the government’s claim that proposed card would be used only for the purpose of accessing Medicare and other government services. It found that “the inclusion of a photograph on the face of the card virtually guarantees its rapid evolution into a widely accepted national form of identification”.

It recommended that to prevent the card from becoming a national identity card the government consider including no information on its face other than the cardholder’s name.

The Bill makes it a criminal offence punishable by up to five years in prison for any unauthorized person to require a cardholder to produce a card.

But the Committee found that while those penalties were well intentioned, they could in practice achieve the opposite result of turning the card into a de facto national identity card.

“These provisions of the bill will criminalise behaviour that is an almost inevitable consequence of this same legislation. It is logically questionable for the government to create a document that can serve perfectly as a high quality identity document, and then to penalise those in the private sector who would want to use it for precisely that purpose.”

“From nightclub bouncer to airline check-in clerk, the temptation to ask for the access card as a form of ID will only be exceeded by the willingness of individual Australian citizens to produce that same document in the face of such a request,” the committee found.

It noted that although in NSW it is technically illegal for businesses to require the production of a photographic drivers license as proof of identity the practice was widespread.

It said that after almost universal registration for the Access Card it was easy to imagine that there would be “widespread pressure from a business community that is highly dependent upon reliable identification documents to repeal the dead letter draconian prohibition against requiring the access card.”

The Committee also expressed concern about the collection of biometric facial recognition data from each cardholder. It said while biometric photographs “would no doubt greatly facilitate the work of the law enforcement and security agencies” no previous Australian government, even in wartime, has effectively
required all of its citizens to give it a physical representation of themselves, nor contemplated storing it in a central database.

All eight members of the Finance and Administration Committee supported the recommendation that the legislation be redrawn for reconsideration. Labor, Democrat and Green members submitted additional more critical comments. Only one member, Liberal senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells submitted additional comments supportive of the scheme.

The Minister Senator Chris Ellison said last night that he would withdraw the legislation in its present form but that he was committed to having a new bill passed before the end of the year.


COMMENT

By Peter Martin
Economics Editor

The Human Services (Enhanced Service Delivery) Bill is a landmark piece of legislation with incredibly widespread implications. If implemented it may well become the action for which this Coalition government is most remembered.

That is why the quality of the legislation, already passed in the House of Representatives, is a scandal.

Witness after witness told the Senate committee that the Bill was poorly drafted, had ill-defined terminology and appeared to reflect policy discussions still taking place.

The Bill was actually only part one. The parliament was asked to pass it before seeing part two which was to “deal with the review and appeal processes for administrative decisions, further elements of information protection and legislative issues relating to the use of the card, including in relation to dependents”.

Little wonder that the Senate Committee concluded that it was being asked to approve the Access Card “on blind faith”.

Among the organisations concerned or simply bulldozed by the rapid and continually evolving nature of scheme are the government’s own Privacy Commissioner, the Victorian Privacy Commissioner, the Australian Medical Association, Carers Australia, the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, Legacy, MedicAlert and Vision Australia.

Yet in his second reading speech introducing the Bill the Minister Mal Brough labeled its opponents “friends of fraud”.

In trying to fast track the creation of one of the world’s largest biometric information databases the government itself has defrauded the parliament. Tender documents were issued before the Bill was even introduced. When Senators asked what was in them, they were told they were not to know.

If there is a case for what the database the government is planning it should make it slowly and calmly, probably after the next election.

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