SPEAKER: First this half hour, months after millions of people had their personal data hacked during the Optus and Medibank cyber-attacks, the Federal Government setting up a new agency to tackle the problem, there will be a new senior official called a Coordinator For Cyber Security, who will lead a National Office for Cyber Security, and that's within the Federal Government's Department of Home Affairs, and along with a round table of business security and tech leaders the Prime Minister is releasing a discussion paper about a new cyber security strategy.

The Home Affairs Minister is Clare O'Neil, she's spoken with the ABC this morning, saying the Government's taking an important step forward.

CLARE O'NEIL: We arrived in Government confronting a real mess with cyber security, so what we saw was different parts of Government and the private sector doing important things, but kind of all rowing in different directions, and what was clearly needed here was political leadership, and we've got that from the personal investment of the PM, and he today has decided to appoint a coordinator to ensure that there is spine and strategy for the work being done throughout Government, and also an office within my department that will support the coordination work.

SABRA LANE: So practically what will that person do, and when will this office be in place? 

CLARE O'NEIL: So two really important tasks for this person. The first will be, as I said, to try to provide some strategy and structure and spine to the work being done across Government. So it will mean things like making sure that the billions of dollars that we are investing in cyber security each year are being spent in a way that's strategic and appropriate, that we've got different parts of Government communicating with each other and working together on helping with cyber security protections across the country.

But Sabra, the other really important part of this person's job will be to help manage cyber incidents in a proper, seamless strategic way across the Australian Government. That is something that has been missing due to the negligence of the former Government in managing this critical area of national security, and today the PM has moved to fix that problem.

SABRA LANE: When will it be in place? 

CLARE O'NEIL: We're in the process of advertising for that role, so we're looking at something over the next month.

SABRA LANE: A discussion paper is also going to be released today on a new cyber security strategy that the Government wants in place from next year. Is it going to set minimum cyber security arrangements for businesses and companies? 

CLARE O'NEIL: Sabra, the Australian Government is coordinating a huge cyber uplift that's been occurring now for eight months. We want Australia to be the most cyber secure country in the world by 2030, and the cyber strategy is the main mechanism that will get us there.

So today the discussion paper was released, which asks a bunch of questions about how we can be the most cyber secure country in the world by 2030, and one of those is about how we can work with business to make sure that they are lifting cyber security standards in partnership with Government.

So I can actually already set minimum cyber security standards, which I have done across eight major sectors of the Australian economy, and the question posed by the cyber strategy is, is that enough, and do we need to lift standards higher for more businesses across Australia.

SABRA LANE: Therefore, do you also envisage widening the definition perhaps of what a critical asset is, and therefore, what entities and businesses have to do to better protect consumer data and themselves? 

CLARE O'NEIL: Yep. It's a really important question, Sabra. We went through Optus and Medibank to the bigger cyber-attacks that Australia has experienced last year, and in those events we were meant to have at our disposal a piece of law that was passed by the former Government, to help us engage with companies under cyber-attack, and that law was bloody useless, like not worth being printed on the paper when it came to actually using it in a cyber incident, it was poorly drafted, and the discussion paper asked a bunch of questions about how it is that we could redraft those laws so they're actually useful to us. They're not fit for purpose at the moment, and I do think they need reform.

SABRA LANE: All right. You talked about Optus and Medibank. Had this coordinator in office been in place when those hacks happened, what difference would they have made? 

CLARE O'NEIL: It would have made a huge difference, Sabra. When Optus hit, much to my shock as Cyber Security Minister, there was no cyber emergency response function in the Australian Government. I am really angry about that. Those events were completely foreseeable events that were completely not foreseen by the previous Government.

Now, we dealt with those incidents well, but that is in spite of Government structures, not because of them. Literally Cabinet ministers stepped in and managed the incident in a way that is not sustainable when we are under basically relentless cyber-attack.

So what we will have now is an individual in the Public Service who is going to coordinate the response across Government and make sure that not only are we deterring and preventing cyber-attacks, but when this occur, which they will continue to occur, Sabra, we are not going to reduce cyber risk to zero, but Australians can get up off that quickly; get services restored, get their data protected, get their identity numbers changed. These are the sort of core things that this person would have been able to do much more seamlessly.

SABRA LANE: Is there merit in having a public discussion about whether ransom should be paid to get back sensitive data that's stolen? 

CLARE O'NEIL: Yeah, I do think it's an important public discussion, Sabra, and that's why I haven't shut it down and said that it's something that we won't consider. Today the PM is hosting a round table in Sydney with cyber experts from around Australia, and this is just the sort of subject that we'll be talking about. But the key question is, we know cyber-attacks are relentless, and they're growing over time, how do we set ourselves up for a safe future in the context of a really dangerous geopolitical environment that wear heading into. So this is a core national security risk, and the PM is very actively and personally involved in it.

SPEAKER: That is Clare O'Neil, she's the Home Affairs Minister speaking with AM's Sabra Lane on the ABC this morning.