ADJOURNMENT

Senator ANTIC (South Australia) (19:51): We're living through a quiet but profound shift in the relationship between the individual and the government in this country. Piece by piece, law by law and system by system, this country is constructing the architecture of a surveillance state. It arrives with soft language—safety, convenience, protecting the children, national security, modernisation—and because the language is so soft, too many of us, particularly in this building, have been asleep at the wheel.

So let's be clear what's underway. The Digital ID System, sold as voluntary, simple and a way to prove who you are online, is the central nervous system of this ongoing and emerging apparatus. Once your identity is digitised, every interaction with government, banks, platforms and, eventually, private services will become trackable.

It'll become linkable. It'll become controllable. I've said it before and I'll say it again: this is the backbone of the future social-credit-style system.

I'm so opposed to this that I introduced a bill to repeal the Digital ID Act, because we shouldn't trust anyone, let alone the government, with that level of permanent and intimate knowledge of its citizens. History shows that powers granted in the name of efficiency are rarely surrendered. We see this pattern everywhere.

Age-verification mandates force ordinary Australians to hand over digital ID documents or biometric data that will be used every day for online services. Alongside these developments, we're witnessing a growing private sector interest in facial recognition technology. Retailers and other businesses have deployed such systems for security and operational purposes.

Then you've got counterterrorism online centres, which will be armed with AI and analysts tasked with scanning social media gaming platforms like Discord and encrypted chats. We're now seeing the expansion of compulsory questioning powers for intelligence agencies that weaken safeguards and treat ordinary legal protections as optional extras. That's one for later in the week in this building.

You've got smart city infrastructure, facial recognition, licence plate readers and data-sharing arrangements that turn public spaces into permanent monitoring zones. And now the push for massive AI data centres is being sold as an economic opportunity. Yet the same facilities that power AI also create the computational capacity for real-time population-scale analysis of behaviour, speech and association.

When you combine that capacity with digital identity and the prospect of programmable money, you're no longer talking about isolated tools; you're talking about an integrated control system. Mission creep is not a theory; it's the historical record. Powers justified for the worst cases are normalised, then expanded and then applied to the merely inconvenient, politically awkward or the non-compliant.

We've already lived through a dress rehearsal in recent years. Compliance was demanded, dissent was marginalised and many Australians discovered how quickly temporary measures become permanent. I'm not against national security.

I'm not against protecting children online, and I'm certainly not against technology. What I oppose is the assumption that the answer to every problem is more centralised power, more data collection and fewer checks on the state. There are less intrusive ways to pursue legitimate goals, and we should be insisting on them.

Australians are not subjects to be managed. We're free people with an elected government and we expect the government to remain limited in their powers. Privacy is not an obstacle to effective law enforcement; it's the foundation of a free society.

Ordinary citizens rely on it to discuss health matters, family issues, commercial affairs, political views and their personal difficulties without the assumption that their words will be inspected by the systems designed for the worst cases. We must ensure that any new obligations are tightly defined, subject to genuine parliamentary oversight and accompanied by robust safeguards for encryption and private communication.

The accumulation of surveillance powers is rarely reversed. It's therefore essential that we get the balance right while we still can. The creep of the surveillance state is not inevitable.

It's a choice. We should choose differently. We should choose a different path.