Junkee, 21 March 2019:BREAKING: Australia's Prime Minister Scott Morrison shuts down media conference when confronted about boasting to colleagues in 2011 he was going to 'cash-in' on rising anti-Muslim sentiment in Australia. He fled because public record since shows he did pic.twitter.com/fMDBdqToPN— Alt-Rupert (@TheMurdochTimes) March 20, 2019
Showing posts with label lies and lying. Show all posts
Showing posts with label lies and lying. Show all posts
Monday 25 March 2019
Australian Prime Minister literally runs away from an awkward question
Scott Morrison’s been
having a bit
of a shocker lately, and yesterday was no exception. After a
journalist appeared to catch him in a lie at a press conference, our esteemed
Prime Minister responded by abruptly ending the conference and fleeing.
ScoMo’s Great Escape
took place after journalist Samantha Maiden asked him about a bit of a touchy
subject: a
2011 report that he urged the Coalition to exploit anti-Muslim sentiment as
part of an election strategy. Morrison has repeatedly denied saying this, and
has been telling media that his colleague Greg Hunt backs him up — on the
record.
Except, as Sam Maiden
pointed out at the press conference, “the problem with that is that Greg
Hunt did not attend the meeting” where Scott Morrison reportedly made the
comments in the first place. She went on to point out that those who actually
did attend the meeting told the Sydney Morning Herald that Morrison had made
the comments, but before she could finish the sentence ScoMo cut her off.
Labels:
#ScottMorrisonFAIL,
lies and lying
Tuesday 12 February 2019
The lies Liberals tell on the subject of aged care
The
Australian, 7
February 2019:
Aged Care Minister Ken
Wyatt was handed a departmental briefing report showing the “winners and
losers” from the Coalition’s $2 billion savings drive in the aged-care sector
shortly after Scott Morrison announced a royal commission and denied funding
cuts.
Documents obtained by
The Australian under Freedom of Information laws show the proportion of
“losers” almost tripled to 53 per cent following the budget savings revealed in
late 2015.
In the three-year period
to 2018, aged-care services that had been classified as “winners” almost halved
to 47 per cent, according to the brief sent to Mr Wyatt.
A series of “hot issue
briefs, question time briefs and general briefs” sent to Mr Wyatt last year
acknowledged the budget hit to the Aged Care Funding Instrument — which is the
basic taxpayer care subsidy paid to all nursing homes — together with
“increasing cost pressures will be putting pressure on the sector”.
Mr Wyatt was also made
aware of reports of “cut backs to staffing”. At a press conference announcing
the royal commission into aged care in September, the Prime Minister was questioned about two cuts to the
ACFI in the 2015 mid-year economic update and the 2016 budget but denied any
had been made.
“No, no, the Labor Party said that. I don’t accept that,”
he said.
Two days later, a question time brief prepared for Mr Wyatt offered advice on
what to say if asked about funding cuts to ACFI.
The ministerial brief
also contains a breakdown of funding changes by domain, revealing that average
annual taxpayer subsidies per resident increased by just $400 between 2016-17
and 2017-18 despite the growing frailty and complexity of Australians as they
enter residential aged care older than ever before.
For the first time,
funding for the two areas that provide extra boosts for nursing home residents
with significant behavioural problems and complex healthcare requirements went
backwards by $300 a person.
The peak body for
aged-care providers, ahead of the April 2 budget, has urged the Coalition to
include an additional payment of almost $700 million each year.
“This estimate reflects
a range of factors, including the value of foregone indexation (through ACFI),”
Leading Age Services Australia (LASA) says in its pre-budget submission, seen
by The Australian. “This is approximately a 5.2 per cent increase in
residential care funding in 2019-20, noting that this is difficult to calculate
as forward estimates for residential and home care are no longer separately
reported.” LASA said it considered the money to be a “down payment” and a
notably larger funding boost might be needed following the findings of the
royal commission.” The commission, which is due to release its interim report
in October and the final version by the end of April 2020, has already
highlighted the widespread industry practice of “doping” nursing home
residents, which doctors, nurses and consumer groups attribute to overworked
staff. [my yellow highlighting]
Sunday 20 January 2019
Australian Federal Election Campaign 2018-2019: the lying continues......
Trump acolyte
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison
promised a presidential-style election campaign and he is delivering .
Like US President
Donald Trump, Morrison is lying shamelessly……..
The
Guardian, 14
January 2019:
Scott Morrison has
elevated an obscure bill to ban cosmetic testing on animals to one of the top
two legislative priorities for the Coalition in 2019, according to his office.
Speaking to ABC News
Breakfast on Monday, the prime minister cited “environmental legislation …
[that] is important for native species” as among the government’s priorities
for the new year, second only to national security.
There is no major
environmental legislation before parliament and the prime minister’s office was
unable to immediately identify what he was referring to.
Morrison’s comments also
caught conservation groups offguard.
Five hours later, a
spokesman for Morrison told Guardian Australia the prime minister was
“referring to the agricultural
and veterinary chemicals legislation amendment”.
The bill – introduced by
the agriculture minister, David Littleproud, in October – makes
minor changes to the regulatory scheme for agricultural and veterinary
chemicals to provide simpler processes for chemicals of low concern.
The federal policy
director of the Wilderness Society, Tim Beshara, told Guardian Australia the
bill had “stuff-all to do with native species”, a sentiment echoed bythe
Australian Conservation Foundation nature campaigner, Jess Abrahams.
An hour after this story
was published, the prime minister’s office clarified the first statement was in
error and claimed Morrison had in fact been referring to the Industrial
Chemicals Bill 2017.
That bill establishes a
new regulatory scheme including banning animal testing for new chemical
ingredients of cosmetics from 1 July 2018. It passed the lower house and was
introduced to the Senate in October 2017 but appears not to have been debated
since then.
Abrahams said: “As far
as we are aware, the main government policy relating to native species is the
plan for a one-stop shop for environmental approvals, which would have the
effect of weakening environmental protection.”
“The government also has
a targeted review of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation
Act for farmers, which could also weaken protection of the environment.”......
In September a Senate
inquiry investigating fauna extinctions heard that a large proportion of staff
working in threatened species management rated
the government’s performance as “poor or very poor”.
The union representing
staff said 91.3% of those who responded to a survey said the government was
doing poorly or very poorly in fulfilling domestic and international
obligations to conserve threatened fauna and 87% believed the adequacy of
Australia’s national environment laws – the EPBC act – was poor or very poor.
Beshara accused the
government of failing its statutory responsibility to fund and implement
endangered species recovery plans. He called on the government to put “some
serious funding towards saving some endangered critters and plants”.
“I am more than happy to
brief the prime minister on what the government needs to do for native species
if he would like.
“He might be surprised
to know that the
Darling River crisis is only one of many ecological crises happening
in Australia right now on his watch. It’s a real mess out there.”
Labels:
elections 2019,
lies and lying,
Scott Morrison
Sunday 6 January 2019
Australian Federal Election Campaign 2018-2019: And so the lying begins......
First cab off the rank with a monumental political lie is the Institute of Public Affairs, a Melbourne-based privately-funded, hard right, elitist and racist lobby group with close ties to the Liberal Party of Australia, dedicated to the denial of climate change, suppression of wage growth, abolition of unions and the dismantling of the universal welfare system along with around 71 other divisive policies.
Anything less like a union for the unemployed it would be hard to imagine.Recruiting John Lloyd will be a boon for @TheIPA. There are more than 680,000 unemployed Australians and the IPA is their effective union. No one else in the public debate is prepared to stand up for people who are locked out of work. https://t.co/GzxqSd2PoK— Simon Breheny (@Simon_Breheny) December 17, 2018
Labels:
election campaigns,
lies and lying
Friday 28 September 2018
Two Boats: Australian Prime Minister caught out by media
News.com.au, 20 September 2018:
Mr Morrison was the
immigration minister who enforced the controversial policy to stop asylum
seeker boats reaching Australia.
The Prime Minister
addressed the trophy in an interview with the Nine Network on Thursday.
“It was given to me by a
mate down in the Shire who runs a sign business. He loved the fact that we did
that,” Mr Morrison said.
“It has been sitting in
my office, by the way, for about five years. I don’t think that there is
anything terribly new about it.”
The
Guardian, 22
September 2018:
Scott Morrison gave
a model of an asylum-seeker boat emblazoned with the words “We stopped these”
to Roman Quaedvlieg as a thank-you gift for his work on the Coalition’s border
protection policy, Quaedvlieg has said….
Morrison said his model
had been with him for about four years but he did not mention that he had also
given out others as gifts….
It’s understood other [boat] trophies were also handed out.
Thursday 20 September 2018
Sometime Australian Prime Minister & MP for Cook, Scott Morrison, is the protector of religious freedom? Don't make me laugh
This was Australia’s
most recent Liberal prime minister quoted in The
Sydney Morning Herald on 17 September 2018:
Prime Minister Scott
Morrison will enact "preventative regulation and legislation" to
shield freedom of religion from future enemies, giving his strongest hints to
date about the government's intentions regarding "religious freedom"
laws.
What a load of
codswallop, manure, dung, heifers dust, cowpats, meadow cocktails – what ABSOLUTE BULLSH*T!
The Liberal Member
for Cook Scott Morrison already
knows that the Australian Constitution without qualification guarantees religious
freedom in this country at federal level:
The Commonwealth shall not
make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any
religious observance, or for
prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, and no religious test
shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the
Commonwealth. [my yellow highlighting]
As the
Australian Constitution is the highest source in the land on this issue, one can only suspect that:
a) Scott
Morrison has never read the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act (as
amended up to 1977); or
b) Scott Morrison is shamelessly pandering to his
far-right, ideologically blind & bigoted supporter base, in the hope of being re-elected in 2019.
Even a callow first-year-in-parliament politician knows that when state law is in conflict with federal law it is federal law which usually prevails and, if either is in conflict with the Constitution it will be the Constitution which prevails.
Having well and truly politicised his own faith Morrison may in fact be creating his own "future enemies" - he has all but guaranteed that someone will take his legislation and regulations to the High Court of Australia - where every word, phrase and punctuation mark will be studied closely.
He
appears to forget that Australia has also ratified a number of UN resolutions which directly or indirectly protect religious freedom and these have been upheld by the courts.
While he ignores the fact that Tasmania has had a religious freedom provision written
into its state constitution since 1934 and Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia,
the Northern Territory as well as the ACT have passed legislation prohibiting
direct and indirect discrimination on the ground of religion. Only South Australia appears to have no legislation specifically covering religious freedom to date.
Morrison also
forgets that whatever legislation he forces through this parliament, or whatever
regulations he imposes, can all be undone in the first instance by subsequent federal parliaments and in the second instance by the minister of the day.
If he really
wants to genuinely strengthen existing religious freedoms he would call a
referendum to change the Australian Constitution.
Even a callow first-year-in-parliament politician knows that when state law is in conflict with federal law it is federal law which usually prevails and, if either is in conflict with the Constitution it will be the Constitution which prevails.
Having well and truly politicised his own faith Morrison may in fact be creating his own "future enemies" - he has all but guaranteed that someone will take his legislation and regulations to the High Court of Australia - where every word, phrase and punctuation mark will be studied closely.
Tuesday 11 September 2018
Kevin Hogan's political backflip
On Thursday 23
August 2018 Kevin
Hogan MP for Page announced that; “This constant rotation of Prime Ministers by both the
Labor Party and the Liberal party, I cannot condone. I am announcing today,
that if there is another leadership spill for the position of Prime Minister
prior to the next Federal election, I will remove myself from the government
benches and sit on the cross benches.”
A second leadership
spill occurred on Friday 24 August 2018 and parliament went into recess.
Kevin Hogan
was nowhere near the cross benches when the Australian Parliament resumed on
Monday 10 September 2018.
He is still a fully-fledged member of the Parliamentary National Party.
Still a National
Party Whip.
Still Deputy
Speaker in the House of Representatives.
This was Kevin
Hogan on the morning of 10 September firmly ensconced in the Speaker’s Chair.
At 12:15 on the same day Hansard shows that Kevin Hogan voted as a Nationals MP against a motion by the Labor Opposition.
Hogan's official statement included an undertaking that he was going to be an independent in a similar style to former MP for O'Connor Tony Crook*.
However Tony Crook's parliamentary entry looks like this....
and Hogan's looks like this.....
Not even a pretence of the announced independence on Hogan's part.
NOTE
* Tony Crook was elected as a WA National Party candidate in August 2010 but sat as an Independent MP for less than three years before retiring prior to the September 2013 federal election. He never sat in the Coalition party room and apparently only attended the Nationals party room for a brief period towards the end of his parliamentary career.
Crook voted with the Gillard minority government on numerous occasions.
Tuesday 24 July 2018
Counting Donald Trump's words and how he uses them......
The
Star, 14 July
2018:
Click on image to enlarge
There’s a lot of
dishonesty: Of all the words Trump said and tweeted as president as of
July 1, 5.1 per cent were part of a false claim.
Expressed differently: Trump uttered a false word every 19.4 words.
Expressed differently: Trump uttered a false word every 19.4 words.
Trump’s dishonesty
density is increasing: The issue isn’t just that he’s talking more these days.
It’s that what he’s saying is less truthful.
In weeks that started in
2017, 3.8 per cent of Trump’s words were part of a false claim. In 2018, it’s
7.3 per cent.
Expressed differently: in 2017, Trump said about 26 words for every one false word. In 2018, it’s down to about 14 words per one false word.
The analysis assessed
the first 30,000 words each president spoke in office, and ranked
them on the Flesch-Kincaid grade level scale and more than two dozen other
common tests analyzing English-language difficulty levels. Trump clocked in
around mid-fourth grade, the worst since Harry Truman, who spoke at nearly a
sixth-grade level.
Expressed differently: in 2017, Trump said about 26 words for every one false word. In 2018, it’s down to about 14 words per one false word.
Newsweek, 8 January 2018:
President Donald
Trump—who boasted over the weekend that his success in life was a result of
“being, like, really smart”—communicates at the lowest grade level of the last
15 presidents, according to a new analysis of the speech patterns of
presidents going back to Herbert Hoover.
Labels:
Donald Trump,
lies and lying,
statistics,
US politics
Friday 20 July 2018
Trump-Putin Helsinki 16 July 2018 Press Conference: the matter of a curious admission and omission
The mainstream media carried transcripts of the 16 July 2018 US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin joint press conference held in Helsinki, Finland.
Video of this press conference is available online.
There is one specific exchange between President Putin and an American reporter.
It went thus:
REPORTER: Did you want President Trump to win the election and did you direct any
of your officials to help him do that?
PUTIN: Yes, I did. Yes, I did. Because he talked about bringing the U.S. Russia
relationship back to normal.
The White House also posted a transcript of the joint press conference.
This is how that exchange between Putin and the American reporter is presented on the White House website:
Snapshot captured on 19 July 2018 |
The Kremlin English version transcript omits this question and answer in their entirety.
The Atlantic spoke with the reporter in question, Reuters' Jeff Mason:
But recordings of the
exchange were muddled for two reasons. First, the English translation of
Putin’s previous response was concluding as Mason began to speak. Second, the
microphone seemed to pick up Mason’s question halfway through—making the latter
half of it easier to hear. (Mason told me that he had held on to the microphone
even though an official had tried to pull it away so that he could ask Putin a
follow-up question. “I don’t know if they turned the sound off during the time
when each of the presidents were speaking, or if it got flipped on and off. I
certainly didn’t touch anything.”)
That the question could be heard clearly at the press conference is demonstrated at 6:10 mins in on this MSNBS The Last Word video.
So why the differing editing of the press conference video and transcripts by the White House, the Kremlin and media outlets.
It is possible that many news outlets took their video and transcripts directly from the White House press office and presumed that any discrepancy was an instance of lost in translation.
The possibility also exists that the 'reshaping' of this question and answer was deliberate on the part of both the Oval Office and the Kremlin because it was realised that, albeit unintentionally, Russian President Vladimir Putin has just publicly admitted that not only did he want Donald Trump to win the 2016 US presidential campaign, he had directed Russian officials to help Trump win.
Labels:
lies and lying,
spies,
US-Russia relations
Wednesday 18 July 2018
An American pute politique went to Helsinki in July 2018......
Putin's putain is the one on the left in this picture, 16 July 2018 |
US National Public Radio, Transcript: Trump And Putin's Joint Press Conference, 16 July 2018, excerpts from President Trump’s remarks:
“During today's meeting,
I addressed directly with President Putin the issue of Russian interference in
our elections.
I felt this was a
message best delivered in person. I spent a great deal of time talking about it
and President Putin may very well want to address it and very strongly, because
he feels very strongly about it and he has an interesting idea…..
And that was a well
fought, that was a well fought battle. We did a great job. And frankly, I'm
going to let the president speak to the second part of your question. But just
to say it one time again and I say it all the time, there was no collusion. I
didn't know the president.
There was nobody to
collude with. There was no collusion with the campaign and every time you hear
all of these you know 12 and 14 - stuff that has nothing to do and frankly they
admit - these are not people involved in the campaign.
But to the average
reader out there, they're saying well maybe that does. It doesn't. And even the
people involved, some perhaps told mis-stories or in one case the FBI said
there was no lie. There was no lie. Somebody else said there was. We ran a
brilliant campaign and that's why I'm president….
I do feel that we have
both made some mistakes. I think that the probe is a disaster for our country.
I think it’s kept us apart. It’s kept us separated. There was no collusion at
all. Everybody knows it. People are being brought out to the fore. So far that
I know, virtually, none of it related to the campaign. They will have to try
really hard to find something that did relate to the campaign. That was a clean
campaign. I beat Hillary Clinton easily and, frankly, we beat her. And I’m not
even saying from the standpoint — we won that race. It’s a shame there could be
a cloud over it. People know that. People understand it. The main thing — and
we discussed this also — is zero collusion. It has had a negative impact upon
the relationship of the two largest nuclear powers in the world. We have 90
percent of nuclear power between the two countries. It’s ridiculous. It’s
ridiculous what’s going on with the probe….
My people came to me,
Dan Coats came to me and some others and said they think it’s Russia. I have
President Putin. He just said it’s not Russia. I will say this. I don’t see any
reason why it would be….
I will tell you
that president Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.” [my yellow highlighting]
CNN, 17 July 2018:
The conservative
editorial page of The Wall Street Journal declared the news conference "a personal and
national embarrassment" for the President, asserting he'd "projected
weakness." Newt Gingrich, ordinarily a reliable voice of support, wrote on
Twitter the remarks were "the most serious mistake of his presidency."
Immediately after his
news conference, Trump's mood was buoyant, people familiar with the matter
said. He walked off stage in Helsinki with little inkling his remarks would
cause the firestorm they did, and was instead enthusiastic about what he felt
was a successful summit.
By the time he'd
returned to the White House just before 10 p.m. ET on Monday, however, his mood
had soured. Predictably, the President was upset when he saw negative coverage
of the summit airing on television aboard Air Force One. It was clear he was
getting little support, even from the usual places.
Former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 17 July 2018:
Republican Speaker in the US House of Representatives Paul Ryan, Statement, 17 July 2018:
"There is no
question that Russia interfered in our election and continues attempts to
undermine democracy here and around the world. That is not just the finding of
the American intelligence community but also the House Committee on
Intelligence. The president must appreciate that Russia is not our ally. There
is no moral equivalence between the United States and Russia, which remains
hostile to our most basic values and ideals. The United States must be focused
on holding Russia accountable and putting an end to its vile attacks on democracy."
The
Guardian, 18
July 2018:
Newspapers around the
world have reacted to Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin’s performances
at the Helsinki summit, and are united in their assessment of which world
leader came out on top.
In the US, several
papers went in hard on Trump. The New York Daily News accused the president of
treason. Its front page featured an illustration of Trump holding hands with a
bare-chested Putin and shooting Uncle Sam in the head with a gun in the other hand.
The Washington Post’s
headline is: “Trump touts Putin’s ‘powerful’ denial”. The paper says Trump
handed the Russian president “an unalloyed diplomatic triumph” during
their summit as he refused to support the “collective conclusion” of the US
intelligence agencies that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election.
The New York Post ran
with the headline: “See no evil”.
White House, Remarks
by President Trump in Meeting with Members of Congress, 17 July
2018:
It should have been
obvious — I thought it would be obvious — but I would like to clarify, just in
case it wasn’t. In a key sentence in my remarks, I said the word “would”
instead of “wouldn’t.” The sentence should have been: I don’t see any reason
why I wouldn’t — or why it wouldn’t be Russia. So just to repeat it, I
said the word “would” instead of “wouldn’t.” And the sentence should have
been — and I thought it would be maybe a little bit unclear on the transcript
or unclear on the actual video — the sentence should have been: I don’t see any
reason why it wouldn’t be Russia. Sort of a double negative.
So you can put that in,
and I think that probably clarifies things pretty good by itself.
I have, on numerous
occasions, noted our intelligence findings that Russians attempted to interfere
in our elections. Unlike previous administrations, my administration has
and will continue to move aggressively to repeal any efforts — and repel — we
will stop it, we will repel it — any efforts to interfere in our
elections.
We’re doing everything in our power to prevent Russian
interference in 2018." [my yellow highlighting]
Thursday 21 June 2018
Trump's Truth
Trump’s ‘truth’
The Truth
Reuters, 15 June 2018:
MUNICH, Germany
(Reuters) - Jean-Claude Juncker has been called many things during his
premiership of Luxembourg and presidency of the European Commission, but
probably never what he says U.S. President Donald Trump called him at the
weekend: “a brutal killer”….
“I think he meant it as
a compliment, but I am not sure.”…..
European Union countries
on Thursday unanimously backed a plan to impose import duties on 2.8 billion
euros’ ($3.3 billion) worth of U.S. products in response to U.S. tariffs on EU
steel and aluminum, EU sources said.
Express
UK, 10 May
2018:
EU chief Jean-Claude
Juncker has said Europe needs to “replace” the United States as a world
superpower in the midst of an angry outburst after President Donald Trump
confirmed he was pulling the US out of the Iran nuclear deal.
Euro
News, 3 March
2018:
European Commission
chief Jean-Claude Juncker has vowed to fight back against US President Donald
Trump's threat of a 25% tariff on steel and 10% on aluminium imports.
"So now we will
also impose import tariffs. This is basically a stupid process, the fact that
we have to do this. But we have to do it. We will now impose tariffs on
motorcycles, Harley Davidson, on blue jeans, Levis, on Bourbon. We can also do
stupid. We also have to be this stupid," he said in Hamburg on Friday
evening.
Labels:
Donald Trump,
lies and lying
Wednesday 16 May 2018
An insider has finally admitted what any digital native would be well aware of - your personal health information entered into a national database will be no safer that having it up on Facebook
Remembering that a federal government national screening program, working with with a private entity, has already accessed personal information from Medicare without consent of registered individuals and entered these persons into a research program - again without consent - and these individuals apparently could not easily opt out of being listed as a research subject but were often only verbally offered the option of declining to take part in testing, which presumably meant that health data from other sources was still capable of being collected about them by the program. One has to wonder what the Turnbull Government and medical establishment actually consider patient rights to be in practice when it comes to "My Health Record".
Healthcare IT News, 4 May 2018:
Weeks
before the anticipated announcement of the My Health Record opt out period, an
insider’s leak has claimed the Australian Digital Health Agency has decided associated
risks for consumers “will not be explicitly discussed on the website”.
As
the ADHA heads towards the imminent announcement of the three-month window in
which Australians will be able to opt out of My Health Record before being
signed up to the online health information repository, the agency was caught by
surprise today when details emerged in a blog post by GP and member of the
steering group for the national expansion of MHR, Dr Edwin Kruys.
Kruys wrote that MHR offers “clear benefits”
to healthcare through providing clinicians with greater access to discharge
summaries, pathology and diagnostic reports, prescription records and more, but
said “every digital solution has its pros and cons” and behind-the-scenes risk
mitigation has been one of the priorities of the ADHA. However, he claimed
Australians may not be made aware of the risks involved in allowing their
private medical information to be shared via the Federal Government’s system.
“It
has been decided that the risks associated with the MyHR will not be explicitly
discussed on the website,” Kruys wrote.
“This
obviously includes the risk of cyber attacks and public confidence in the
security of the data.”
The
most contentious contribution in the post related to the secondary use of
Australians’ health information, the framework of which has yet to be announced
by Health Minister Greg Hunt.
Contacted
by HITNA, the agency moved swiftly to have Kruys delete the paragraph
relating to secondary use.
In
the comment that has since been removed, Kruys wrote, “Many consumers and
clinicians regard secondary use of the MyHR data as a risk. The MyHR will
contain a ‘toggle’, giving consumers the option to switch secondary use of
their own data on or off.”
Under
the My Health Records Act 2012, health information in MHR may be
collected, used and disclosed “for any purpose” with the consent of the
healthcare recipient. One of the functions of the system operator is “to
prepare and provide de-identified data for research and public health
purposes”.
Before
these provisions of the act will be implemented, a framework for secondary use
of MHR systems data must be established.
HealthConsult
was engaged to assist the Federal Government in developing a draft framework
and implementation plan for the process and within its public consultation
process in 2017 received supportive submissions from the Australasian College
of Health Informatics, the Australian Bureau of Statistics and numerous
research institutes, universities, and clinicians’ groups.
Computerworld, 14 May 2018:
Use of both de-identified
data and, in some circumstances, identifiable data will be permitted under a
new government framework for so-called “secondary use” of data derived from the
national eHealth record system. Linking data from the My Health Record system
to other datasets is also allowed under some circumstances.
The Department of Health
last year commissioned
the development of the framework for using My Health Record data for
purposes other than its primary purpose of providing healthcare to an
individual.
Secondary use can
include research, policy analysis and work on improving health services.
Under the new framework,
individuals who don’t want their data used for secondary purposes will be
required to opt-out. The opt-out process is separate from the procedure
necessary for individuals who don’t want an eHealth
record automatically created for them (the government last year
decided to shift to an opt-out
approach for My Health Record)……
Access to the data will
be overseen by an MHR Secondary Use of Data Governance Board, which will
approve applications to access the system.
Any Australian-based
entity with the exception of insurance agencies will be permitted to apply for
access the MHR data. Overseas-based applicants “must be working in
collaboration with an Australian applicant” for a project and will not have
direct access to MHR data.
The data drawn from the
records may not leave Australia, but under the framework there is scope for
data analyses and reports produced using the data to be shared internationally……
The Department of Health
came under fire in 2016 after it released for download supposedly
anonymised health data. Melbourne University researchers were able to
successfully re-identify a range of data.
Last month the Office of
the Australian Information Commissioner revealed that health
service providers accounted for almost a quarter of the breaches reported
in the first six weeks of operation of the Notifiable Data Breach (NDB) scheme.
The Sydney Morning Herald,
14 May 2018:
Australians who don't
want a personal electronic health record will have from July 16 to October 15
to opt-out of the national scheme the federal government announced on Monday.
Every Australian will
have a My Health Record unless they choose to opt-out during the three-month
period, according to the Australian Digital Health Agency.
The
announcement follows the release of the government’s secondary use of data
rules earlier this month that inflamed concerns of patient privacy and data
use.
Under the framework,
medical information would be made available to third parties from 2020 -
including some identifying data for public health and research purposes -
unless individuals opted out.
In other news.......
The
Sydney Morning Herald,
14 May 2018:
A cyber attack on Family
Planning NSW's website has exposed the personal information of up to 8000
clients, including women who have booked appointments or sought advice
about abortion, contraception and other services.
Clients received an
email from FPNSW on Monday alerting them that their website had been hacked on
Anzac Day.
The compromised data
contained information from roughly 8000 clients who had contacted FPNSW via its
website in the past 2½ years to make appointments or give feedback.
It included the personal
details clients entered via an online form, including names, contact details,
dates of birth and the reason for their enquiries….
The website was secured
by 10am on April 26, 2018 and all web database information has been secure
since that time
SBS
News, 14 May
2018:
Clients were told Family
Planning NSW was one of several agencies targeted by cybercriminals who
requested a bitcoin ransom on April 25…..
The not-for-profit has
five clinics in NSW, with more than 28,000 people visiting every year.
The most recent Digital
Rights Watch State of Digital Rights (May 2018) report can be found here.
The report’s
8 recommendations include:
Repeal
of the mandatory metadata retention scheme
Introduction
of a Commonwealth statutory civil cause of action for serious invasions of
privacy
A
complete cessation of commercial espionage conducted by the Australian Signals
Directorate
Changes
to copyright laws so they are flexible, transparent and provide due process to
users
Support
for nation states to uphold the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the
Child in the digital age
Expand
the definition of sensitive information under the Privacy Act to specifically
include behavioural biometrics
Increase
measures to educate private businesses and other entities of their
responsibilities under the Privacy Act regarding behavioural biometrics, and
the right to pseudonymity
Introduce
a compulsory register of entities that collect static and behavioural biometric
data, to provide the public with information about the entities that are
collecting biometric data and for what purpose
The
loopholes opened with the 2011 reform of the FOI laws should be closed by
returning ASD, ASIO, ASIS and other intelligence agencies to the ambit of the
FOI Act, with the interpretation of national security as a ground for refusal
of FOI requests being reviewed and narrowed
Telecommunications
providers and internet platforms must develop processes to increase
transparency in content moderation and, make known what content was removed or triggered an account suspension.
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