Senator BOLKUS (5:31 PM) —I want to say a few things about the Privacy Amendment (Office of the Privacy Commissioner) Bill and indicate that this debate may not take all that long. This bill separates the Office of the Privacy Commissioner from the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission and creates an independent statutory Office of the Privacy Commissioner.

The record will show that the opposition opposed this bill in the House of Representatives and did so for a number of reasons. We were concerned that the planned separation may result in a net decrease of resources available to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner and to the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission as a result of that separation. We were concerned that gains in effectiveness as a result of the separation of the Office of the Privacy Commissioner from HREOC would be marginal. We were also concerned that administrative efficiencies and service delivery benefits flow from the fact that the operation of the Privacy Commissioner was within HREOC. In essence, our view was that the separation may in fact decrease available resources and that the existing situation was one that maximised existing resources.

While the opposition continues to remain sceptical about the benefits of separating the Office of the Privacy Commissioner from the commission, we are now prepared to allow the bill to pass on the strength of assurances we have received from HREOC in relation to funding of the proposed split. It has to be recognised that there is already an internal division in funding between the Office of the Privacy Commissioner and HREOC and that there has been an internal division of resources between those two bodies. That is something that we have established time and time again in estimates proceedings.

We are concerned, however, that the government has been guilty of misrepresenting the effect of this bill and its approach to the protection of privacy generally. For instance, the government claimed in a statement on 7 December last year that the bill `will allow the Privacy Commissioner to operate more effectively in protecting the privacy of all Australians' and described it as `a concrete measure to strengthen the Privacy Commissioner's ability to ensure that the personal information of all Australians is handled fairly and securely'. This is demonstrably not the case. Under the bill, the functions of the Privacy Commissioner will remain unchanged. Constituted as a separate office, the Privacy Commissioner will continue to have all the functions it currently has as an office within HREOC. Basically what we are talking about here is an administrative division of functions only—it neither increases nor decreases the powers of the Privacy Commissioner.

We have to acknowledge that this sort of misrepresentation is something that we are used to from this Attorney-General. Senator Harradine in question time today raised the issue of misrepresentation in respect of doing away with the X-rated video category. He made a very clear case, as he has done over a number of years now, that what the Attorney-General did do was perpetrate a fraud on the Australian public in the way that he announced a new category and the abolition of the previous one as if to indicate to the public that something was going to change. On 7 December last year, his government put out a statement indicating that, once again, something would change and that as a consequence of these measures there would be a strengthening of the Privacy Commissioner's ability to ensure that information is `handled fairly and securely'. What we have here is not an enhancement of powers; what we have here is in fact an administrative division of functions between HREOC and the Privacy Commissioner.

So the government's blustering on this bill has been to disguise its real delay in finalising its proposals for privacy protection in the private sector. That is a very pertinent point in this debate. Whilst the Attorney-General has been out there arguing that something that will not happen was going to happen under this government's intentions, what the Attorney-General has done consistently over the last four years now has been to run very much behind the pack when it comes to privacy protection in the private sector. He has tried to put up this sort of smokescreen in respect of the Privacy Commissioner in an attempt to mislead the public, to mislead constituencies, about the government's actions in respect of privacy protection in the private sector.

What we saw last year was a government which has been in a sense, as I said, dragging its feet since 1996 when it first announced its intention to introduce protection for personal information in the hands of the private sector. It was caught on the hop by reports of a huge database containing information on all Australians and that that database would be up and running by Christmas. This caused the government to hurriedly release so-called `key provisions' of its proposed legislation and what we essentially saw was a poor substitute for effective protection.

If the government's private sector legislation ever comes to fruition, let me put on the record now that we will give it a solid working over in this Senate and parliament. We will work to ensure that protection provided for personal information is adequate protection. We note already that a key number of bodies, including the AMA, have been critical of the so-called key provisions of the government—critical to the extent that they claim, and I support their claims, that those key provisions are not adequate in protecting people from disclosure of medical records. That is one area we will need to examine, and there will be so many others.

In 1989 I introduced the first bit of legislation in this parliament to attach privacy principles and privacy protection to an important part of the private sector—that is, the credit reference institutions and agencies and databanks. The collection of data has moved on quite substantially since that time. In fact, with technology it has moved on exponentially over the last 10 years. There is now a need to further extend such legislation to data collection areas that 10 or 12 years ago we never thought would be possible.

It has taken the government 3½ years and they have made no progress, and let me place on the record that this bill does not make any progress either. This is an administrative division of functions, one that the opposition have opposed because we have always seen it as a diversion of the debate but a diversion which in a sense has many negative impacts, negative in that it may cost more to run two separate organisations than it has to run a Privacy Commissioner within the ambit of HREOC.

As I have said, the shadow Attorney-General, Rob McClelland, has taken the view that we will allow this bill to pass on the strength of assurances we have received from HREOC. As a consequence, we will not be opposing the legislation at this stage.