Andrew Leigh

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
RADIO INTERVIEW
2CC BREAKFAST WITH STEPHEN CENATIEMPO
TUESDAY, 20 AUGUST 2024

SUBJECTS: Peter Dutton’s hypocrisy on visas, humanitarian impact of ongoing conflict in the Middle East, helping Australians avoid being scammed

STEPHEN CENATIEMPO, HOST: Time to talk Federal Politics with Andrew Leigh, the Member for Fenner, and Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities and Treasury. Andrew, good morning.

ASSISTANT MINISTER ANDREW LEIGH: Morning Stephen. Great to be with you.

CENATIEMPO: Now, I want to ‑ I'm interested in talking to you about this telecommunications amendment, but first, I'm surprised that you want to talk about Peter Dutton's remarks on Gazan refugees here, because I'm sure the government thinks that they're on a winner here, but you're not.

LEIGH: Well, Stephen I'm happy to talk about anything that's on your mind, but certainly what Peter Dutton's doing seems to me extraordinarily divisive, and something that I think would trouble many Canberrans…

CENATIEMPO: How is it divisive, hang on, I've got to ask, how is it divisive to say, "We'll take the refugees if there's proper security checks"?

LEIGH: Because Peter Dutton knows that the security check regime is exactly what it was when he was in government. 

CENATIEMPO: Yeah but hang on.

LEIGH: The personnel are the same.

CENATIEMPO: But you're offering visitor visas that don't have those same security checks, and Ed Husic has said the quiet bit out loud, which I'm sure he wasn't supposed to say, "We're doing it because it's quicker".

LEIGH: The system that is in place is exactly the same system that was in place when the Coalition was in office. What Peter Dutton was doing yesterday was asking the government to reveal the details of security screening. We're not going to do that in open Parliament, and he knows that.

The regime that is in place is being administered by the same Director‑General of ASIO, Mike Burgess, who was in place when the Coalition was in office. The system has not changed. Now all that's changed is that Peter Dutton sees an election approaching and goes to his standard approach of looking to divide and looking to use racial issues in order to try and get a cheap headline.

CENATIEMPO: See, Andrew, that's a horrible slur, and it's unnecessary, and the regime ‑ whilst the regime might not have changed, the visa class that your government is offering these people is different, that's the point here.

LEIGH: Look, there are a range of arrangements that were made when 12,000 Syrians were brought in, when we had the fall of Kabul and people were being brought rapidly from Afghanistan, there was a range of arrangements that were being made at that point…

CENATIEMPO: And all being screened in third party countries and usually taking up to 12 months.

LEIGH: They were not all screened in third party countries, and this is ‑‑

CENATIEMPO: I said, "most of" ‑ don't put words in my mouth ‑ I said, "most of".

LEIGH: In this case we have approved about 3,000 people to come from the Palestinian territories. We've rejected around 7,000 applications. We're doing those careful screening processes; people are being checked into the Movement Alert List. The system that is in place is the very same system that was operating under the Coalition.

CENATIEMPO: And why is it our responsibility and not neighbouring nations or in fact any other nation around the world?

LEIGH: Well, other nations have been taking people from Palestinian territories.

CENATIEMPO: Nowhere near the numbers we have.

LEIGH: With an area that has millions of people, we have taken 3,000 people from that area. Some of these people have direct connections to Australia, and so it's therefore appropriate that we step up. This has been a humanitarian catastrophe. More than 1 per cent of the population of Gaza has been killed. Some of the people coming to Australia have lost children, lost homes, have lost businesses, everyone has lost friends. It is a roiling disaster, and the sooner it comes to an end the better. I very much hope that this week there will be an agreement between Hamas and Israel to accept the peace deal that's been on the table for more than two months now.

CENATIEMPO: Doesn't that tell you everything, that you're talking about an agreement between a terrorist organisation and a sovereign state, and they've already rejected it anyway.

LEIGH: Well, I'm still hopeful that it's going to get through. Certainly there's contestation around some of the provisions. The fact that the United States has stepped in has been important. There have at certain points been statements by both Hamas and Israel that they will agree to this.

The important thing is to get the hostages out and to get a ceasefire in place and allow the rebuilding of that community. The humanitarian disaster is appalling, and it's unfolding every day in front of our eyes.

CENATIEMPO: Well let's talk about something that we can agree on, and that is the issue that Australians getting text messages these days are generally not from friends or family, they're coming from scammers and various other nefarious links. Talk us about to ‑ you've made an amendment, or is it a proposed amendment or has it actually happened? The Telecommunications Amendment Act, what is actually going to change here?

LEIGH: This is setting up a new regime which will have regulation over the sender ID, so people know that sometimes you'll get text messages which will have an ID on the top. This will ensure that if someone wants to send out a message with the Westpac name on the top, that that is linked only to the bank. People will be familiar with the work that the Government is doing in order to block scam text messages, more than half a billion scam text messages have been blocked since we came to office. But there's still too many getting through, and more of them get through at night than during the day. I was talking to one telecommunications carrier who said that's because they have more people working during the day. Well, we need to put pressure on the telcos to make sure they're blocking those scam texts at night.

CENATIEMPO: Yeah, but ‑‑

LEIGH: There's a lot of work the Government's doing on scam texts, frustrating as the problem still is for many of us.

CENATIEMPO: So, yeah, the problem I ‑ and look, I commend you on this, but I mean the difficulty that anybody who's trying to police this is going to have is that the hackers seem to be smarter than the protectors at every turn. So what you're saying is that that there will be like a dedicated ID for real people, but is there still a risk that the hackers could actually replicate that?

LEIGH: There's an ongoing risk, yes. So if you want to have the ID of Westpac, you won't be able to get that unless you're Westpac, but the scammers are constantly playing with the content of messages, getting new phones in order to use those burner phones to send out more text messages, using artificial intelligence in order to try and find their way through the system. So it is vital that the telcos and Government and the anti‑scam centre are stepping up. This is just one of those constant whack‑a‑mole problems.

CENATIEMPO: Yeah.

LEIGH: The scammers are putting industrial scale resources into trying to get through to our phones, and the Government is making sure that we've got the best technology, the best personnel, the best laws and the best systems in order to combat what's become a really pernicious problem.

CENATIEMPO: So Andrew, once these IDs are allocated, will it be up to the providers that we work with who will then inform their customer that, "Hey, you get a text message with this number" or whatever it is "at the top, you know it's from us, if it doesn't have this it's not from us".

LEIGH: You won't be able to send a text message with "Westpac" on the top unless you're Westpac.

CENATIEMPO: Right.

LEIGH: So that's what the register will do, but, again Stephen, that's just one of the measures. Obviously a lot of the text messages that come through come through just from a number, and so in that case we need to make sure that we've got the artificial intelligence systems looking to identify what's a scam text and what's not, trying to block as few of those legitimate texts as possible. Obviously one of the challenges is that you don't want to block legitimate texts, and you also want a system where people can trust text messages coming through. I think part of the problem now is you get a message from Australia Post, and you look at it and think, "Is that real or is that a scam?"

CENATIEMPO: Yeah. Look, and that's why I ‑ I mean I get the Australia Post one all the time, and I've got the Australia Post app, so I just ‑ my first thing is go and check the app and see what that says, if it doesn't line up with the text message it's ‑ but it's not that easy for everyone. Look, it's an ongoing battle.

LEIGH: That’s a good tip.

CENATIEMPO: Andrew, good to talk to you. We'll catch up in a couple of weeks.

LEIGH: Likewise, thanks Stephen.