​​​​​​Topics: Cyber Security, Sensitive information, National Security, Migration, Claire O’Neil

​GREG JENNETT: Why don’t we go to one minister overseeing a pile of pre-budget work at the moment. As Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil’s got responsibilities stretching from national security, cyber security, the country’s migrant intake all the way across the ASIO as well. Drawing in towards her first year in the role, a pile of reports and decisions are due imminently from Clare O’Neil. She joined us here in the studio a little earlier.

Clare O’Neil, great to have you back in the studio. Now, you told us on a previous appearance, during the Jobs and Skills Summit in fact, that you were wanting to embark on a major overhaul of the migration system because it’s too slow and it’s too uncompetitive. That is soon to land. But since then we are seeing that migration rates are pressing up against the 190,000 cap. Doesn’t that somewhat undermine the argument for wholesale change, that the system is broken, if it’s delivering those numbers?

CLARE O’NEIL: Yeah, so, Greg, just backing up a little bit, one of the consensus positions out of the Jobs and Skills Summit across business, across unions, across civil society was that our migration system is not working in the national interest at the moment. It’s slow, it’s cumbersome, it’s expensive, it’s bureaucratic and perhaps most importantly it’s not giving us the skills and the people that we desperately need to tackle the challenges ahead.

So the way that you presented it there sounds like, you know, the goal is to get as many people into the country as you can, and that’s absolutely not what a successful migration program looks like.

GREG JENNETT: Right.

CLARE O’NEIL: What we need to think about here is in a really strategic manner what are the skills our country needs to tackle the problems of the future and how we can design a system that works better for migrants, for business and, most importantly, for Australian citizens.

GREG JENNETT: And when will that body of work be available, and when does legislation – which I’m sure is required fall into place beyond that?

CLARE O’NEIL: Yeah, so this is a really substantial reform project because our migration system is genuinely one of the most important things that the Federal Government does – decide who of the very many billion people of the world we’d like to invite to come here and help us in our national endeavours. So from the Jobs and Skills Summit we started a review process that was led by Dr Martin Parkinson, who was previously the head of a number of government departments. That review will be released before the budget on the 9th of May, and I will provide at that time an architecture for what a new migration system will look like.

So that will take the best bits of the report that Professor Parkinson has done, the consultations that we’ve undertaken and make sure what we can put in place the bones of what a system will look like, and we’ll then work through the detail with some really detailed consultation.

GREG JENNETT: Sure, so that is the architecture of the process.

CLARE O’NEIL: That’s right.

GREG JENNETT: What about the here and now, though? I know you don’t want to be measured on sheer numbers alone, but inevitably it’s a part of the budget settings.

CLARE O’NEIL: Yep.

GREG JENNETT: Are we running too hot? Have too many simply come in too short a time of late?

CLARE O’NEIL: Yep, so I think the best – the best determinant of that is what is happening in the labour market. And you’ll note, Greg, that the unemployment rate remains historically quite low right now. But I really just want to make sure people understand – the migration process we’re going through at the moment is not about bringing more people into the country. That is a decision for the government of the day based on the economic circumstances in the labour market at that time. Our priority is always about having quality jobs for Australians.

The point of the review is whatever size this program looks like, is it delivering the needs of the country at any point in time. The clear answer to that right now is no, and that’s why we’re moving to fix the system.

GREG JENNETT: All right. We’ll await that work. New Zealand’s Prime Minister Chris Hipkins has told the media in his country that he’s coming to Australia this weekend and he really hopes to be able to land something that “improves pathways for New Zealanders living and working in Australia.” What’s he referring to there? Is that pathways to citizenship?

CLARE O’NEIL: So this has been a running sore in the relationship we have with our deeply beloved family and friends across the ditch. There’s no two countries in the world probably closer than Australia and New Zealand. That’s not reflected in public policy, and a lot of your viewers might know that New Zealanders living in Australia have very different rights and entitlements living here than Australians do living in New Zealand. So this is a point that the Prime Minister has talked about quite a bit in the time that he’s been the leader of our country. And I think he and the New Zealand Prime Minister have had some good discussions about whether there’s any scope to improve that situation.

GREG JENNETT: And, clearly, there is if he’s flagging – what – an announcement, an agreement? Is that what’s in the wind?

CLARE O’NEIL: So I’ll let the Prime Minister speak a little bit more about that.

GREG JENNETT: All right. What about other aspects that have been an irritant in that relationship? Since the Prime Minister spoke to Chris Hipkins’s predecessor, Jacinda Ardern, about a rethink of 501 deportations of Kiwi criminals who’ve served their time, has that happened? Has that been implemented? A slowdown and review on a case-by-case basis?

CLARE O’NEIL: So it’s not a slowdown or a review – what the Prime Minister said at the time is that we would take a common-sense perspective on whether someone was, in fact, by all intents and purposes an Australian. So what you saw under the previous government was people who had lived here literally their entire life but ended up being New Zealand citizens by descent. They might never have visited New Zealand and yet they were being sent by the former government back to New Zealand if they’d committed a crime in Australia.

So the Prime Minister asked the Immigration Minister and myself to change how we were thinking about those problems in a very minor way – and that is in those very exceptional circumstances where someone is for all intents and purposes Australian we should take that into account when we consider deportation decisions.

GREG JENNETT: And has that been taken into account such that deportation decisions that otherwise might have been taken have not proceeded?

CLARE O’NEIL: It has been - the impact has been genuinely tiny.

GREG JENNETT: Right. To TikTok ban, there’s further work on this again by you. But the implementation of the Attorney-General’s department’s decision of a week or so ago within your own department are all users of publicly owned government phones now ceasing, or have they ceased TikTok?

CLARE O’NEIL: Yep, so, Greg, my department already had banned TikTok from government devices, as had about half of all government departments and agencies. So the Attorney-General’s direction in this regard was to ensure consistency across the Commonwealth.

GREG JENNETT: And what further work then will come through the public service at least, if not bigger decisions regarding the rest of us and TikTok, as part of your social media review? When’s that due?

CLARE O’NEIL: So the social media review is a classified document and it highlights the national security concerns that the Australian government should be mindful of with regard to social media. The one thing I will say about that document publicly is that this is not a discussion that is just defined to one social media platform and technology products that are made in one country in the world.

All social media products contain some inherent aspect of risk, and what I always say to consumers is that if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product. People have got to understand that these apps are collecting data about us and they’re selling them in different circumstances to, you know, the highest bidder. So I would like to see the country take a little bit more of a strategic approach to that, and that’s something government’s considering at the moment.

GREG JENNETT: And will any element of that work, classified though it is, feed in to publicly released information?

CLARE O’NEIL: Yet to be decided.

GREG JENNETT: All right. On cyber, your discussion paper is out for the strategic review. It’s not particularly long, but it does say in relation to the Commonwealth Government’s role we need to clarify what community and victims of cyber attack can expect from the government following an incident.

CLARE O’NEIL: Yep.

GREG JENNETT: That’s victim support, but it’s also post-incident response. How developed are you in actually laying down what those responses will be from the Government’s point of view?

CLARE O’NEIL: Look, I think the main thing we’ve done to date is set up a structure for how we will manage this. So, if I can just roll back a little bit, I arrived in my position as the first cabinet minister for cyber security. That was one of Anthony Albanese’s first decisions as Prime Minister, to recognise that this is a national security problem our country faces and someone needs to coordinate the work across government in that area, and he’s asked me to do that job.

When we arrived in office there was no incident response function in the Australian Government to speak of. That is crazy that we’re in that situation. It’s crazy because we are going to – we have experienced large-scale cyber attacks and to a degree they will continue, Greg. Whatever we do, even if we are the most cyber safe country in the world, we’re still going to see cyber attacks because cyber crime is that prolific. So part of the resilience kind of approach for the government is to make sure that we’re able to help the country recover quickly.

So we have established an incident response function in my department. You’ll remember that recently the Prime Minister announced the appointment of a Cyber Coordinator, and that person will be responsible for conducting this nationally.

GREG JENNETT: And if this was responding to a private sector attack – we don’t have to sort of name the names; there’s been a bunch of those of a very high profile – would you seek to defray the costs of any Commonwealth role in victim support and charge that back to the companies affected?

CLARE O’NEIL: Yes, absolutely, Greg. So I think I don’t want to see the cost of the risk here being pushed back on to government and the taxpayers. We’ve got big Australian companies here, some of whom are highly profitable, and my view is that they need to be doing everything they can to protect the data of their customers. And in some instances where they’re unable to do that we think they should pay the costs of recovery.

I think I’ve made that really clear and, indeed, with Medibank and Optus and Latitude I have asked them directly to pay for various costs, and they’ve agreed to do that.

GREG JENNETT: And what do they amount to?

CLARE O’NEIL: Not sure what the totals are at this stage.

GREG JENNETT: Okay, all right. Now, look, Karen Andrews, your opposite number, a relatively high‑profile woman on the opposite side of parliament to yourself, is stepping to the backbench. She occupied, in fact, the ministry immediately before you.

CLARE O’NEIL: She did, yeah.

GREG JENNETT: Your reflections on her contribution, even though I’m sure there’s much that you don’t see eye to eye on.

CLARE O’NEIL: Well, we are from different sides of politics, but I think anyone who puts their hand up to serve their community in the way that she did, representing her local area for 13 years, deserves, you know, huge commendation. We have lots of different views around this parliament, but we are actually all here for the right reasons, and I’m certainly sure that Karen should feel really proud about the work that she’s done. I know she’s got a family, children, like I do, and I just wish her all the very best for the future.

GREG JENNETT: Yep, she seems comfortable with the decision, as she expressed it today. Clare O’Neil, we’ll get you back before too long.

CLARE O’NEIL: Great to talk to you, Greg.

GREG JENNETT: We’ll talk to you again.