House Standing Committee on Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government
Transcript: Conference Opening of Proceedings and Session One
Conference met at 9.06 am
CHAIR (Ms King)—Welcome, everybody here today. We are a little bit behind schedule, but we will try to make up the time during the course of proceedings. My name is Catherine King, and I am chair of the Standing Committee on Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government. First, I acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we gather and pay my respects to elders past and present.
Welcome to the 2010 Think Future conference. I believe it was Abraham Lincoln who said that one of the best things about the future is that it comes one day at a time. It is our hope that today will be a singly useful and interesting one for all of you here. My committee is holding this inquiry to foster discussion, ideas and networks about smart infrastructure in Australia. We hope this event will identify areas for future consideration as our inquiry into this area progresses. At a later date the committee will be calling for submissions and holding public hearings.
Before we get underway, I will share three quick facts that I took out of a NICTA paper that was presented to us earlier this week. First, in Australia’s eight capital cities the movement of goods is expected to grow by 70 per cent between 2003 and 2020, with the resulting effect on our air quality, productivity, congestion and commuting and work times. Second, projections show that by 2020 the avoidable cost of congestion in Australia’s major cities will rise to $20.4 billion. That is up from approximately $9.4 billion in 2005. Third, the average Australian mobile phone chip now has the same order of computing speed as a multinational company used a decade ago for a fraction of the cost. It is possibly these three facts—the growth in the volume of transport over the next two decades, the effect of growth on our cities and where we live and the accompanying ability of technology to meet these challenges—that neatly sum up what smart infrastructure is trying to resolve.
We have gathered today an enormous breadth of expertise and knowledge. Our speakers are leaders in their fields and are at the forefront of smart infrastructure thinking and strategy. It is our hope that you will be challenged, stimulated and encouraged by what you hear today. Before we start, I have just a few housekeeping matters. Today’s program and other general information can be found in your delegates’ pack. Conference staff all have lanyards to identify themselves; please ask them any questions you may have. Because of the large number of presentations we have today, I ask that you be punctual in returning from breaks. In addition, our last session will be an interactive dialogue between you and members of the committee who are here with us today and whom I will introduce at that time, and I ask that you take note of your questions and keep them for then.
Our opening speaker today was first elected to federal parliament in 1996 as the member for Grayndler. On 3 December 2007 he was sworn in as Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government. Since that time the Hon. Anthony Albanese has been a passionate and forward-looking advocate within this government for infrastructure investment and the opportunities presented by embedding smart systems into that infrastructure. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Anthony Albanese.
Opening Address [9.10 am]
ALBANESE, Mr Anthony, Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government
Mr Albanese—Thanks very much, Catherine. I too wish to acknowledge the traditional owners of country and pay my respects to their elders, past and present. Through Catherine King, the chair of the House of Representatives committee, to Paul Neville, the Deputy Chair of the committee, Ian Macfarlane, the shadow minister and John Sullivan, the member for Longman—friends one and all. This is a gathering of some of the best and the brightest of the public and private sectors, to look at a topic of great interest. The fact that 200 people have shown up to a forum such as this, to launch this inquiry, shows that it is timely that the committee is devoting its time and energy to the issue of smart infrastructure.
I want to congratulate Catherine and her committee for the way that they have begun this inquiry and conducted it so far. Ministers can give a committee a brief. Once that happens, though, it is up to the committee to take the ball and run with it. This is an example of the parliament working as it should—not just parliamentarians talking to each other but parliamentarians reaching out and making sure that we have the widest input of views as possible on these issues. I want to thank the speakers who have given up their time to come here today. This is indeed a very impressive gathering, and I am sure it will be an extraordinarily productive day and kick-off to the inquiry.
This is an opportunity to look at these issues with fresh eyes. It is an opportunity to get submissions from individuals, from businesses, from public sector organisations, from the academic sector and from consumers of infrastructure about the direction as we move forward. Importantly, it is a chance to break out of the silo approach, which is taken too often. That is the reason why I am the minister for infrastructure, rather than just transport, and I am pleased that the opposition have a shadow minister for infrastructure. I have said that I am the first minister for infrastructure but I will not be the last. It is clear that over a period of time there will be a recognition that you actually need to look at systems as a whole and how they integrate. With this inquiry looking at transport, energy, water and communications and how they all interlink, I think there is a real prospect of moving forward.
Take the example that Catherine raised, of communications. One of the issues about the National Broadband Network is that it is a transport system in the digital age. It will change the way that workplaces work. It will change the nature of how people use our road and rail systems. It is one of the great challenges in this nation, where we have some 22 million Australians spread across this vast continent. For us, the National Broadband Network is particularly important. This week, we had a bit of debate about the report that I released last week, State of Australian cities 2010. I want to quote one of the responses to this—not to have a go at the response, of course, because we always like our friends in the media, but to say to you what the challenge is. The Sydney Morning Herald editorial on Monday spoke about ‘fluffiness’ with regard to the state of the cities report. It said it is:
… fluffy about remedies. There is much talk of “liveability” and something called “smart infrastructure” that is to be—
and this is quoting me—
“a central component of the shift towards a systems approach”.
They conclude that with help. They have no idea. I rang the editor about smart infrastructure. It is lot of things; it is not fluffy. It is central to the economic debate in this country; it is central to the employment debate; it is central to the debate that we have to have about our cities. That was an indication that we have a way to go in lifting up that debate.
One of the things that inquiries do is take an issue that is underground—an issue that is being spoken about in the boardrooms, in the government, in the opposition and in the parliament—and through the input of you today and through the activities of this committee, you are changing things through that process. Part of change is about lifting up that debate and being able to create a momentum behind change across the economic and social sphere that then has an impact on the political debate in this country. So I am very pleased. I am also pleased that Ian Macfarlane will be contributing today. It is appropriate that we move forward wherever we can in a bipartisan way. Ian has substantial credentials in being prepared to do that on other issues. This is a committee, by the way, for everyone’s information, that has, through Catherine and Paul, some leadership, and the membership of the committee work in a bipartisan way and produce some really good work, particularly on freight systems, shipping and other issues. I would look forward to that being consistent.
I would like to make some comments about infrastructure, the government’s objectives and how we have set about achieving them. The first thing that we did was lay a foundation for infrastructure policy development. We did that by establishing Infrastructure Australia. It is an approach that brings together the three tiers of government as well as representatives of the private sector. The board is chaired by Sir Rod Eddington, someone who has a great deal of experience across the infrastructure sector. The role of Infrastructure Australia is not to fund anything. I often get correspondence saying, ‘We want Infrastructure Australia funding.’ Infrastructure Australia does not provide funding; it is not that sort of body. It is an advisory council. It is an advisory council on two separate issues. Firstly, it has developed an audit of Australian infrastructure—what we have and what we will need into the future. It has developed an infrastructure priority list and a pipeline of projects on which it makes recommendations to the government and then the government makes decisions on that. Were it a funding body you would have difficulty attracting anyone from the private sector to participate because of conflict of interest issues, which is why we have established the structure which is there. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly in the longer run, it is about an appropriate regulatory regime. What are the policy changes that can be made? The first piece of work that it did was on public-private partnership guidelines—getting some uniformity there. It is doing work on reducing cost to business for bidding on projects. It is developing a national freight strategy. It is developing a national port strategy. That work—not as sexy in terms of the headlines in the tabloids—is just as important in the long term. It is an important task we have given Infrastructure Australia.
At the same time the government have invested in infrastructure. We have doubled our investment in road funding. We have quadrupled our investment in rail funding. We have the first ever significant investment in water infrastructure for our cities. We have changed the way that we deal with infrastructure because we recognise that, unlike former programs, you need to have an approach that does not look at road or rail and does not look at regional or urban but actually looks at the integration of the cities as a whole. We recognise that everything is connected to everything else, and that is an important component when it comes to smart infrastructure and the role that smart infrastructure can play into the future.
‘Smart infrastructure’ is shorthand for innovative, technology based, adaptive infrastructure—infrastructure that, once built, could serve our economy’s needs for the rest of this century and beyond. Not long ago, this was a bit of a New Age concept. When I announced the establishment of this inquiry, I flagged the enormous potential to apply advances in information technology to tackle bottlenecks and urban congestion. Australians are now beginning to see practical, everyday examples of smart infrastructure, such as traffic signals in Sydney and Melbourne that prioritise bus flow. Our investment in the Kwinana Freeway in Perth will help install advanced technologies, like variable speed limits and lane management systems. When complete, road users will get real-time traffic information, freight vehicles will get priority access when it is needed and all will benefit from a safer and more integrated road and transport system.
In energy, there is our $100 million investment in the Smart Grid, Smart City demonstration project. This trials advanced grid technologies to improve energy efficiency to homes and businesses. Technologies that allow power generators to manage and control real-time grid performance, meaning more reliable, efficient electricity, less energy loss and less greenhouse gas emissions.
Of course, we know from the experience overseas that increased reliability is nothing to sniff at. In the United States, the Department of Energy recently funded smart grid technologies which are helping reduce outages and disruptions that account for more than a quarter of electricity costs. So it is fair to say that even the first-generation applications are proving their mettle and improving our management of congested cities.
There are lots of good ideas out there, and this inquiry and today’s conference are about harnessing them. We need, however, that broader focus. When I studied economics at university—and, indeed, at school with Mr Boreham here—we were told to look at our economy as a system of moving parts where change to one section had an impact across the whole system. We need to look at infrastructure in very much that way.
It is clear when it comes to transport that you cannot plan the moving of goods without also planning the movement of people. When it comes to Sydney, the number of times I have had to explain that the Northern Sydney freight line and the Moorebank intermodal terminal and those plans for freight are actually about improving the passenger services—it is extremely difficult. However, we need to get the message through about those interrelationships between systems.
I want to run through as well some of the other systems that we need to change. I want to run through four reforms that we have done. First is the IA process. As part of that also I will add one thing to what I have already said, which is about the formation of a national transport regulator. One of the issues that we have to look at if we are going to apply smart infrastructure across the economy is breaking down some of the state-by-state approaches. It is absurd that we have nine rail safety regulators in this country. It is absurd that we have seven maritime regulators. It is lucky the ACT does not have an ocean or we would have eight. We need to look at these systems as we move forward. A single national transport regulator is a major national microeconomic reform and one that we need to continue to drive.
Secondly, I want to point out to you that the COAG Infrastructure Working Group is also playing an important role. It is a group that I chair and it brings together the state and territory bureaucracies, essentially, from around the nation. It is pretty clear that one of the things that we need is not just new investment but to look at how smart infrastructure enables us to use existing infrastructure better and get more out of it. Governments and the private sector do not have bottomless pits of money, so we need to look at how we can use existing infrastructure better.
There are real examples out there. One I want to point out to you is at Albion Park, which is in the south of Wollongong in New South Wales. It had the busiest regional intersection in Australia. A $700,000 investment there has installed traffic cameras and uses specially designed algorithms to moderate traffic flows. This is a project between NICTA, who are participating today, and the New South Wales RTA. The result has been an increase in the intersection’s capacity, such that a planned project of $20 million to fix it will not be needed for another decade. It was a $700,000 investment, rather than a $20 million investment—therefore, freeing up money for other projects. It was a smart way to use smart infrastructure. Smart infrastructure is smart financing for government and for the private sector.
The third issue I want to draw to your attention is the State of Australian cities 2010 report. As Catherine pointed out in her introduction, the costs of urban congestion with no action taken were estimated by the Bureau of Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Economics at $20 billion. This is an economic issue about productivity, but I want to say this: it is also a social issue. If you look at social issues such as domestic violence and family break-ups, a direct correlation can be given between the rates at which social breakdowns and divisions occur and travelling times to and from work. If you actually track it by suburb, you can see a relationship there. It is a fact that many working parents spend more time travelling to and from work in their car than they spend having quality time with their kids at home. So we need to look at those issues as social issues, not just economic issues.
The fourth issue that I want to raise is communications and how they fit in. I have already spoken about the National Broadband Network but I want to mention again just a couple of examples of how it is working. The Rudd government has invested some $45 million to trial advanced train management systems in South Australia. These deploy satellite based GPS and wireless broadband communications to manage train movements. This is having a major impact on efficiency and is an example of where we have federal cooperation leading to good outcomes. If this is successful, the Australian Rail Track Corporation will look to rolling out this technology across our interstate and Hunter Valley networks, replacing ageing physical land based control and signalling systems and permanently increasing the capacity of the rail network. It is simple improvements like these that Access Economics estimates could boost GDP by up to $13 billion a year.
Some of this change was initiated by the former government but until very recently, when I became the minister, on the freight lines in northern New South Wales the crew still had to stop, physically get out of the train and go through a ticketing system in order to get access to the next section of the network. I actually thought they were joking when I got that briefing. We know that smart infrastructure when applied to rail will improve reliability, and deliver cost savings and the ability for more trains to travel on the network at any one time. This is just a practical example of how communications and the application of broadband technology could revolutionise the way that our economy functions.
In conclusion I want to say, as ministers tend to do, that I come with an announcement. Today, I am pleased to announce the establishment of two Australian government smart infrastructure awards. These will champion on the national stage excellent design that delivers innovative solutions to infrastructure challenges. We are doing this for the same reason that you are having this inquiry: to lift up public debate and to challenge people and organisations in the application of smart infrastructure. The major award will be the Australian Smart Infrastructure Award for an infrastructure project that embeds innovative technology solutions in one of the seven priority areas that Infrastructure Australia has identified. The second award will be the Smart Infrastructure Research Award, with a research grant of $25,000 to an individual for a smart infrastructure research proposal—again, in one of Infrastructure Australia’s priority fields.
The nomination process for the inaugural 2010 awards starts today and closes on 14 May. I urge you to get word out and ensure that we have a substantial number of nominees, some of which, I am sure, might come from among the people in this room. Structurally, we are designing the awards to reflect the way that we see the rollout of smart infrastructure, which is not just about government; it is about government and the private sector working in partnership. Hence, I announce that Infrastructure Partnerships Australia—Brendan Lyon, its Executive Director, is here today—has generously agreed to host the awards from 2011. We think that picking up the expertise of the peak private sector organisation is a good way to go and is a great example in practical terms of the public and private sectors working together.
Last night the IPA had its annual awards. It was a very impressive line-up. I want to congratulate all the 2010 IPA award winners, especially the Port of Melbourne Corporation’s channel-deepening project for its well-deserved recognition as project of the year. As someone who supported the project, which was a bit controversial, I am particularly pleased that some of the doomsayers about that project were proven wrong. It is a major economic productivity project for the nation and it is one in which smart infrastructure and best technology were used to ensure that there was a good sustainable outcome as well as a good economic outcome.
Let me conclude by making the point that today’s discussion is just a beginning. I look back to the time when I began working in this building. I worked for Tom Uren, who was the Minister for Administrative Services and was therefore in charge of the building, government purchasing et cetera. He was also the Minister for Local Government. I sat in Old Parliament House with a typewriter; I did not have a mobile phone. But new technology was coming through—we got a fax machine. We got one of the first fax machines because we controlled the rollout, so we gave it to ourselves—as you would. We thought this was fantastic—this machine that you could put a bit of paper on and where the paper popped out at another end. It seems so simple to my nine-year-old, who is better with IT than I am and who would be horrified to think that it never existed. We thought this was great. There was just one problem: no-one else that we knew, except the Prime Minister, had a fax machine. So not only could we not send anything, except to the PM’s office to check it was working; we never got anything out of it either.
That was not that long ago. It was during our lifetimes. Even during my time in parliament—within 12 years—the application of technology has revolutionised the way that we work. Not all of it has been positive in a social sense, in the terms of the number of emails that we get! What we need to do—and it is the role of the parliament—is to provide leadership on these issues: get ahead of the game in terms of where the country is going and, as the world becomes a more globalised place, understand the way the globe is going, so that we play a role in ensuring that Australia does what it does best—which is, get ahead of the game and be a world leader. We have an opportunity to do that. I think this committee has an important role to play in providing that leadership for Australia.
CHAIR—Thank you very much, Minister, for that challenging address and for setting the scene so well, not only well in terms of the challenge the committee has in undertaking this inquiry, but the important role that everybody in this room plays in lifting the importance of smart infrastructure up into the public debate. I thank you very much for agreeing to open to conference and also for your very challenging presentation.
SESSION ONE: Opportunities for and benefits of smart infrastructure investment
[9.37 am]
CHAIR—Our next speaker was named by the Australian Financial Review as being in the top five powerful leaders in information industries. Glen Boreham was appointed managing director of IBM Australia in 2006 but actively joined IBM 20 years before that in 1986. I know Glen is an enthusiastic proponent of creating sustainable communities through a deep integration of business, technology, society and government.
Mr Boreham—Ms King, Minister Albanese, the Hon. Ian Macfarlane, the Privacy Commissioner, Professor Batterham, and ladies and gentlemen, I first of all thank the House of Representatives infrastructure committee for inviting me here to speak today. Based on the comments that the minister just made, perhaps I should be coming back here at a later time and making a sales call about technology to the building manager at Parliament House!
This morning I would like to stimulate the thinking of this conference by sharing with you IBM’s global experience—our observations on working with smart infrastructure projects right around the world, particularly in this region. For over a year now—IBM operates in 174 countries—we have been conducting a conversation. It has been a conversation with government and with businesses about digital infrastructure. The central point of our discussion has been this: the infrastructure of the industrial age—our roads, rail, water and electricity grids—and the infrastructure of the digital age—data centres, PCs, mobile phones, embedded devices—are merging. Too often we do not think of them together; we think of them as completely separate. And as these two—the physical and the digital—come together they offer us an opportunity. It is an opportunity to build intelligence into the systems upon which the Australian economy truly depends: our transport, communication, health, energy and water systems.
Right now, many of those systems that I referred to are dumb. When I say that they are dumb, I do not mean that critically. I mean that many of our systems are simply unaware. They were built using the technology available at the time and are now outdated. The parts are disconnected. They do not know what is going on. The system cannot respond as a whole and we cannot see it failing. You can see the results of this disconnectedness in much of the existing infrastructure around the world—including, unfortunately, here in Australia. Every year, burst pipes cost the city of Melbourne 50 billion litres of water before repair crews can get there to address those issues. Just to put that into context, 50 billion litres of water is enough to supply the city of Melbourne for a month.
We heard from both Catherine and the minister that every year Australians waste $9 billion by sitting in avoidable traffic congestion, and that will grow to over $20 billion by 2020. That does not include the cost of petrol, the negative impact on the environment and the social issues that the minister just raised.
Let’s look at electricity. There is so much focus in this country on how we generate electricity. Do we use clean coal, brown coal or black coal? There are issues around wind farms. What gets far less airplay is the fact that every year 10 per cent of the electricity that is generated is lost in transmission through grid inefficiencies. Another 11 per cent is wasted because consumers lack the information to use electricity more effectively. If we could solve those problems regardless of how we generate the electricity—and there are valid debates there—we could have a significant impact on the industry’s carbon footprint and its efficiencies.
The good news is that now we can infuse intelligence into our electricity, water and transport systems. If you think about it—and, despite the minister’s comments about the lack of technology in Parliament House—we have been deploying digital infrastructure in each of our organisations, whether they are public or private, for some time. Today we have computer chips and transistors built into virtually every aspect of our lives. In fact, a rather frightening statistic is that today there are one billion transistors per person on the planet. Next year there will be 30 billion RFID tags, electronic tags, tracking virtually everything in the world, from letters to livestock, as it is used today in Australia. The world is instrumented, but, thanks to wireless technology and the internet, these objects can now talk to each other and communicate back to us.
When we talk about the power of the internet we typically talk about it regarding people—we talk about two billion people, emerging populations, joining the internet—but perhaps more significantly than the people, the internet today connects over a trillion things. It is the internet of things. In my view we have reached a tipping point, where our individual systems in the world are sensing and providing us data, but we now must take the next step. We need to gather it. The minister talked about the silos. We need to gather the data from the individual silos and analyse it so that we can use it in an intelligent way to create better infrastructure outcomes for Australia. Every time one of those trillion devices reports back to us it gives us a chance to do something better—to prevent failure or waste, to be more productive or efficient, to make smarter decisions. Those decisions can change our quality of life and the productivity of our country.
I will give you some examples. As early as 2002, Singapore introduced smart-card ticketing, covering buses, rail, taxis and trams. Today, Singapore has the world’s most affordable and heavily used public transport system in the world, with nearly three million people riding on buses and 1.5 million people riding on trains. Commuters use their smart cards and their mobile phones to pay for any train, bus, rail or taxi fares. There are 22,000 readers spread through the system; there are seven million transactions a day. The key point is that this is not just convenient from a consumer perspective. The information from every one of those seven million transactions is then used to generate decisions that make Singapore’s transport system more intelligent—to change routes, to reduce congestion, to look at altering schedules in response to real time consumer demand. Singapore was an early adopter of smart technology. There was a small pocket of investment that went largely unnoticed in the rest of the world.
I believe that just over a year ago the game changed for all of us. The global financial crisis precipitated an unprecedented raft of public investment in infrastructure around the world. Here, in Australia, we saw the government take a position with its economic stimulus package, including many infrastructure projects. As the minister has just said, the key is now to ensure that a good portion of this is invested in projects with very long-term benefits. I believe that this is where building smarter infrastructure comes in, because this does not just create jobs in the short term; it also addresses the issue of national importance—national economic importance, social importance and environmental importance.
The minister mentioned what is happening in the US with smart grids as a compelling example. The Obama administration’s Smart Energy plan, which was announced in October last year, is a $3.8 billion investment to build a nationwide smart electricity grid. It will not only create tens of thousands of jobs in America, at a time when their unemployment is in double digits; it is estimated that by creating a smarter and therefore more reliable energy grid the project will save that country over $20 billion—and that is just the start. It will also help seed the foundation of a growing renewable energy industry in the United States because the smart grid will allow the US to harness the abundance of sunlight on the west coast and the wind in the mid-west to power communities across the country. Already today in North Carolina families are halving their electricity bills by using solar panels that feed back into the grid. And North Carolina has 126 days of sunshine a year, compared to—as I learnt when preparing for this speech—a rather surprising 220 days a year here in Canberra.
Another benefit is that the US plan will put 40 million smart meters in homes and businesses and empower consumers and families to make decisions about how they monitor and control their energy use. This will not just cut individual power bills; it will lead to the creation of whole new industries to manufacture this technology in entrepreneurial companies. This is why the idea of smarter systems is resonating with decision makers in the public and private sectors and why we are seeing increasing evidence of smarter infrastructure creating value.
I will give a couple more examples about some things that we may not naturally think about. Analytics and mobile technology have helped the city of New York reduce its crime rate by 27 per cent. Analytics has taken the Mayo Clinic’s ability to accurately detect the warning signs of brain haemorrhage from 70 per cent to 95 per cent, allowing doctors to take preventative action and to save lives. Taiwan’s intelligent rail network runs its trains on time 99 per cent of the time. In Spain, integrated electronic health records mean patients can go to any health facility in their region and know that the doctor will have available up-to-date, current records on their health. In Stockholm, intelligent tolling reduced traffic congestion in that city by 25 per cent and carbon emissions by 40 per cent. Malta have introduced a new smart grid that at once integrates both its power and its water grids across the whole country. They can identify water leaks and losses in the electricity grid, allowing utilities to respond more quickly and reward customers who use less energy and water.
So how will building smarter infrastructure benefit us here in Australia? It will not just make our systems more efficient. I believe it will strengthen the very fundamentals of our economy. Last year, IBM asked Access Economics to consider for us five areas where smart infrastructure could make a contribution to the nation’s economy. Not surprisingly, we selected broadband but the other four were electricity, irrigation, health and transport.
In each of these five areas, Access Economics found the benefits of smart technology far outweighed the costs. They concluded that smart infrastructure offers a wonderful opportunity to lift Australia’s long-term growth rate. This research conservatively estimated that, in these five quite narrow areas, investment in smart infrastructure would increase gross domestic product by 1.5 per cent, add over $80 billion to our economy and, significantly, create hundreds of thousands of new economy jobs.
In addition to those calculated benefits, Access Economics also identified a large number of other outcomes that are clearly of enormous value. They include reduced greenhouse gas emissions, more efficient supply chains, new business models, perhaps whole new industries and new ways to work. The minister talked about the social impact of traffic congestion, but by deploying smart technology we could put more jobs in regional Australia. We could allow more people the flexibility to work from home, as that made sense, and this could have a significant impact on workforce participation.
I personally believe that there is one more benefit that we can add to the list that is largely overlooked. It is something that is cultural rather than economic. Building smarter infrastructure requires us to work differently. It requires us to work together to collaborate in a way that has not been a normal process when building infrastructure anywhere in the world, including Australia. I am not just talking about the mechanics of public-private partnerships. None of the systems I have described—energy, water or transport—is really controlled by any one agency, sector or company. To build smarter infrastructure we will need ongoing structured collaboration amongst all those in government and across business, the non-government sector, academia and communities. I know that that is possible from a recent experience.
Last year I led a forum where we invited over 40 public and private sector leaders to address the issues of deploying digital infrastructure and smart infrastructure in Australia. Going into that forum, I remember having a discussion with my team as to whether we would be able to reach any consensus. We had very prominent environmental leaders sitting side by side with industrial polluters. We had regulators sitting next to the regulated. What astonished me in that discussion was that there was complete agreement that smart infrastructure was essential for Australia’s growth and prosperity. The only issue was how to develop it as quickly as possible.
Of course, there are tremendous benefits to smart infrastructure, but I should acknowledge that there are some serious matters that we as a country and the committee need to consider. We need to clarify the role of government and the private sector. We need to agree on standards. It is not a headline-grabbing issue but standards are critical if we want elements of infrastructure to be able to interface with one another: transport with energy, energy with water, education with health care and health care with government services. Clearly we must consider the important issues of maintaining individual privacy and institutional security, and I expect the Privacy Commissioner may comment on that in a moment. There are serious, important perspectives on all sides of this debate. But, no matter which viewpoint you share, everyone agrees our systems need to be smarter, more efficient, more accessible, more equitable and more resilient. Now is the time to build them.
In conclusion, investing in smart infrastructure will prepare Australia to participate and compete in the global digital economy. It will make our buildings cleaner and safer. It will make our country a better place to live in. It will be an engine for Australia’s economic growth far into the future. Given our sparse but technically savvy population—one of the reasons IBM is able to bring work into the country is the quality of our skills in this country—we will be able to use that potential in a way that really matters for all Australians.
When we build a new school hall, we cannot focus just on the bricks, the tiles and the timber; we must infuse it with technology to make it a smart school hall. When we build a new hospital ward, again, we cannot focus just on the physical; at that time we must infuse it with the digital technology required to make it a smart hospital. By thinking differently and by merging the physical world and the digital world, we can create a smarter Australia that will deliver a prosperous and sustainable future for us and for generations to come. I applaud the government on the announcement today of the awards. I think that we have made a great start in progress in Australia, and the minister went through a number of examples of that. But I call on the committee, because there is so much potential and so much more that can be done. I commend the House committee for holding this review, and I greatly look forward to its outcomes and findings. Thank you.
CHAIR—Thank you very much, Glen, for that terrific overview of the opportunities for smart infrastructure and also of the investment that IBM has made in progressing the debate around smart infrastructure. I also thank you for your comments about collaboration. Hopefully, some of what you said is what today is about and is one of the messages well and truly heard by the committee.
Our next speaker has had a distinguished career in research and technology in both the public and the private sectors. He was Chief Scientist to the Australian federal government from 1999 to 2005 and has worked with CSIRO in areas such as mining and mineral processing. He is a member of the Prime Minister’s Science, Engineering and Innovation Council and is President of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering. Please welcome Robin Batterham.
Dr Batterham—Thank you for the introduction. Hopefully, we can have a PowerPoint show—although I understand that is not de rigueur anymore. I acknowledge that the people here present know this area far better than I do. My job, therefore, as president of the academy is not to give you a whole string of answers to think about or to paint pictures of where we could be but to perhaps throw out a few challenges. By way of doing that, I note that the theme has really already been stated: it is about integration. Whether it is integration of the digital world with the physical world, as Glen just mentioned, or, as in the several examples the minister mentioned, it is tying together whole different systems—not just traffic systems—that ought to be the theme, and I am sure it will be for the day.
A PowerPoint presentation was then given—
It is a pity the minister is not here, because one could scare him a little bit about the evolution of fax machines. If the idea is that you poke a piece of paper in one end and it mysteriously appears in the PM’s office at the other—and that was only 12 years ago; I did not realise how slowly some places move—I would gently point out that you may think Spock and his teleportation is a load of rubbish, but you can now hit a certain elementary particle and change its spin and then see another particle, metres away and not connected in any way whatsoever, change its spin as well. That is the first element, now proven, of teleportation, and wow—is that going to solve some of the infrastructure problems!
You are not expected to read the slide I have up here. It is dated 2001, so it is not yet 12 years old—let’s get the arithmetic right. The point of putting this slide up is that people have been thinking about this integration and how you go about it in a systematic way for a long time. I am not going to go into the details of that other than to say—and you can find examples that are considerably older than this one—that we have been talking about integration for a long while. What we need to do is a bit more of it.
I just remind you that Australia as a whole does not rank No. 1 in the world on urbanised population, but we are up there; we are No. 20. Most of the urbanising population in the world, as many of you know, is of course in developing countries, and that provides them with more opportunities in some ways than we have. I will come back to that. Because of this urbanisation, I think the realisation of just how dependent we are on mobility—people mobility and goods mobility—in some ways has not sunk in enough. I throw that out as one of the key things: mobility per se is one of the key indicators of social wealth, social health and, of course, how well you are tackling infrastructure.
I have thrown in one little example of how the rules of the game keep changing. There is a picture of Hong Kong, so I am told, in 1934. I love the fact that a university in Hong Kong was set up essentially from the proceeds of gambling: the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology was half paid for by the Hong Kong Jockeys Club. What does that have to do with infrastructure? I do not think we can use that model in Australia, but why not? More seriously, when you look at Hong Kong now, the interesting thing is that Hong Kong cannot guarantee its electricity supply. It has brownouts. They do not like it, and they work pretty hard to make sure they do not, but when they get their brownouts what they find is that the number of deaths from heat exposure rises unreasonably—in other words, they have some in any case. It is tied up with the fact that they have allowed so many high-rises close together that they block the wind. So, when the air conditioning goes off and you go out onto your little balcony to get a bit of air, it is dead still; the wind cannot get through. So now, in their planning, any new high-rises—they are built in large numbers, of course—have to be built taking cognisance of the natural wind flows, that effect you get when you walk down most main streets in Australia. They have to enhance the wind flow rather than stopping it.
I remind you also—but I do not think you need any reminding, because I will come onto mobility a few times—that emissions from mobility are pretty significant. It varies with the town that you are looking at. Given the data there, all I would suggest is that it is not a small number and it is, of course, growing.
This integration theme is, of course, well known, but let me give you some examples of where we demonstrably do not apply it. Firstly, the picture on the top right predates anyone in this room. It is, I think, part of a rendition of the Great Fire of London, in which, essentially, a whole city was destroyed through lack of ability to fight fires, flammable materials, inappropriate building codes and a whole string of things. I just put that in to remind you that our water reticulation system is actually not built on the basis of what water people need for everyday use; it is built for firefighting. The size of the mains, the supply pressures and so forth are built and designed around firefighting. We do not want to see a City of London-type event ever, anywhere, so I do not object to that per se. What I point out is that this is a little bit like teaching science in schools. I will not get onto that subject other than saying that some of the teaching of science in schools—about 90 per cent of it—is targeting the 10 per cent of students that are going to go on and do science and engineering. That is nowhere near enough—we should have a lot more doing science and engineering—but that is a separate topic and not for this House committee. But this notion that you target the bulk of what the use is ought to be part of our integrated planning.
I think that in some ways—I am not sure if Glen would agree with me—Australia has been cursed with having too good an infrastructure in the IT area. It is not just some old telephone lines on a pole there, for those of you that can remember such things. Because we have had such good services—and we have been up there with world leaders for many years—we have not had the great drive and the great urge to leap forward to where the leading edge is.
I would remind you, and it is not a criticism, that when we get our broadband rolled out—because it is still going to take a little while to happen—it will have the capacity that South Korea, they like to be called Korea, already has. It is hardly that we are going out to the leading edge of the world. Mind you, you only have to change the boxes around to go from where our planned capacity is to 10 times that and that is not actually such a major investment. So it is not a criticism per se, it is just pointing out that in some ways we have had it too good in terms of the incentives to go a lot further.
When you look at the trade-offs, we all understand that there is no infinite money supply for all of the things that we would like to do. In fact, I often thought during the years that I spent working with the government here—and some very capable ministers I might add—that the role of government is actually clear-cut. It is how to selectively say no in the nicest possible way—think about that. There is not an infinite supply of money, we all realise that. That is my point. Costs and benefits are there to be traded off and it is not just about economics, it is also about social acceptance of change and what it does to people. These things are not clear-cut.
I will use mobility as a working example. You can reduce accidents by spending money on improving road systems by some very smart systems as well. Equally, you can encourage a just-in-time delivery process which sharpens up the economy no end, particularly in the manufacturing and retailing areas. At the same time the changing of traffic flow patterns, even to reduce accidents, does change social patterns of where people live, for example, and this was alluded to. I read today’s news—you do not have much option on a delayed plane coming up to Canberra—and I was intrigued to see in the Melbourne Age an article on transport in Melbourne and public health. It alluded to—I have forgotten the figure—it is something like $40 billion or $50 billion a year that obesity costs Australia. One of the key things to get obesity down is to get the amount of time people exercise up by the order of 30 minutes a day. Those that live close to public transport tend to get their half-hour a day, that is what the study shows. Those that drive to and from work get on average about seven minutes per day. I have not seen the corresponding data, so I cannot verify it: does obesity follow with this particular statistic. All I would note on it is that there is an interconnectedness that demands some really very clever integration. I will stop on that in the interests of time because I realise that we are running short.
Let me say a few things on e-mobility. Sunk capital, capital that is invested, does not roll over just because somebody thinks of a better, brighter way of doing things. The average age of all vehicles in Australia is apparently 9.9 years. You do not change that stock over to hybrids or to electric cars just because it is going to have a better overall impact, for example, on emissions or, for that matter, change the congestion patterns.
I would like to say something about housing. Being politically correct, as I always am, I will not say anything about insulation other than mentioning the fact that I have a house in another country, it comes with having family connections. In that house which we just renovated we were told what we had to do in terms of the triple glazing on the windows, none of this simple double glazing stuff, thank you very much. We were told many other things about what we could and could not do, which is fair enough for an old house in old city with a lot of planning controls.
But the interesting thing about Munich—and that is a picture not too far away from the house that I am referring to—is that they have done the sums, and they are actually using them on what they have to do to be carbon neutral by 2050. You can say, ‘That’s several political timeframes away; who gives a toss, anyway?’ but they are actually implementing it. One of the first things they have decided to do is to get the rate of renovation of houses up from 2.3 per cent to 3.8 per cent, otherwise they would not make it in time, through re-insulating and rebuilding houses. I have already done my bit for their economy on that score!
One of the things you see all along the tram routes and the underground routes, which I find outstanding—it seems to have been rejected in Melbourne—is four- to five-storey housing. These four- to five-storey houses are built around an inner court yard, so you can have a bit of peace and quiet. And if it was not minus 10 degrees with a metre of snow you could actually have a barbecue. The notion that you need a car if you live there is nonsense. If you want to go on holidays you hire a car. It is as simple as that. If your children, grandchildren or whatever live way out in the sticks somewhere you might consider having a small car but basically you do not need a car in that city because you can pack people into the transport corridors. Melbourne already has transport corridors in terms of having quite a few trams that rumble up and down. Of course you can have a go about the number of them and how crowded they are during the peak period, but to me a most obvious thing for Melbourne, as it will keep increasing in size—that is guaranteed—is that within 50 metres or even 100 metres of all tram lines, they should allow five-storey buildings. Then you have another million people in with very little infrastructure cost. Interesting! It is all about integration.
The next slide talks about smart mobility. This is something which comes more into Glen’s area than mine—or many others who are experts on the transport side—but one of the things you can look at is the numbers game: what you save per day, and the hours per year.
Now I come to the last talking slide before I finish. We can obviously make much better use of water, and steps like mandating the use of rainwater tanks, even in metropolitan areas, are quite smart. But that is only the tip of the iceberg of what you really can do with water if you say that the supply, distribution and reuse of water is a key part of infrastructure.
To close, I want to give you two little examples. You can regard it as integration or lack of integration. This slide shows a picture of a block of flats—I think it is one of five or so—in Flemington, where the unemployment rate of the occupants is very high indeed. I will not quote a figure because I will probably misquote it, but it is very high: it is multiples of the national average. Clearly, those who live here are economically disadvantaged people. A charitable fund and the Victorian government got together to put a bit of money in, as I understand it, to supply internet access to every family in these flats. Obviously they had telephones—copper wire—laid on in the place, but this was about paying the cost of internet access. Six months later the unemployment rate of the occupants of those flats had dropped by 30 per cent. Why? Presumably, because the people were better connected. They could actually look and see where the jobs were. They could actually send applications in, and so on. There is not much other explanation. That is a small example of the integration of the social side with the rest of infrastructure; they are inextricably linked.
My last example is something I have a bit of a bee in my bonnet about. It is about planning new cities when there is redevelopment involved. To their credit, in planning something like Docklands in Melbourne—these examples are very Melbourne-centric because I happen to live there for a good bit of the year—they got some things right. Firstly, it does not look too bad at all, in my opinion anyway. And there are good views of the water and so on.
Secondly, the tram service they extended down Collins Street goes through Docklands and then comes back up whatever the street is; I do not know the names. This is pretty smart sort of going. There are a few bike paths and so on. This is all starting to sound like nirvana. I was talking to someone from the academy—and if I have the figures wrong, you can correct me—who was commenting that they knew a family that lived in one of these high-rises in Docklands and they were one of only two families in the whole place. What sort of population is that? That is a very thin slice of population and all of my social engineering tells me this is actually not very smart. They have not put a wall up around it yet but that is the next step—don’t take that one seriously.
What they do not have—and this is where I would criticise the planning—is the diversity of, for example, performance spaces. There is no small theatre; there are no cinemas there—enough said. I understand the developers paid for the new little performance theatre which is on Southbank but that is three, four or five kilometres away from this development. I am not saying it is not smart because I am sure there are lots of other factors that I am not aware of. I will just finish by saying that an integrated approach also means an approach which takes cognisance of social values. The key for change, to me, and this is an unlikely thing to say, is plan, talk, plan, talk, dot, dot, dot, going on ad nauseam. The point is that we are not doing enough of it demonstrably, as I hope I have indicated to you. My final parting shot is: remember that large first of a kind always need special attention. Thank you.
CHAIR—Thank you so much, Robin, for challenging us again and reminding us that the discussion about integration is not new. The challenge is actually doing it. It was terrific to hear you talk about some of the examples, particularly in terms of high-rises in Flemington. I know that block very well as a former social worker in Melbourne. It is terrific to hear about some of the projects going on there. One of the major challenges facing us, both as legislators and initiators, of smart infrastructure policy and systems is how to manage the huge amount of data generated as well as protect people’s privacy. In fact, many view this as the key issue.
Karen Curtis has been Australia’s Privacy Commissioner since 2004. In her previous position as Director of Industry Policy at the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, an organisation representing some 350,000 Australian businesses, she had responsibility for privacy from a business perspective. We are delighted to have her here today.
Ms Curtis—I too acknowledge the traditional owners of the land and I would also really like to acknowledge the committee because, to the best of my recollection, in the almost six years I have been Privacy Commissioner, I have never been involved in this early stage of a committee inquiry. It has usually been at the pointy end where there is a bit of argy-bargy, so it is really good that the committee is taking this opportunity to think about some of the issues. My key message today—and it sort of works a little bit with infrastructure—is that privacy should be built in, not bolted on.
I want to make it clear that I firmly believe that smart infrastructure has the potential to improve our lives. Therefore, we should grab all the opportunities we can, as quickly as we can. So I am not here as a blocker. I do not want to be seen as the baddie in the room. I really think we need to take into account people’s personal information as we design smart infrastructure, but that is not a blocker. If we take the opportunity to embed privacy in the design and operation of the systems, we are going to have less cost for governments and business, because we will not have to tack it on at the end, and we are going to find individuals and our community will be much happier and better served by the services.
As Catherine said, there is an enormous amount of data that is going to be generated by smart infrastructure. A lot of it is going to be about people in their homes. It is good we are having that conversation now because, for most of us, we think that what we do in our homes is sacrosanct. It is where we unwind. We do not want our other everyday activities to be monitored. We do not want to live in a surveillance society in Australia.
I want to talk today about a few of the key privacy issues we will face in the rollout of smart infrastructure across Australia. If we get it all right, I think it will ensure that there is a huge public take-up of and commitment to the smart systems that will arise. I am essentially interpreting smart infrastructure as a use of information and communications technology to enhance the operation and use of existing and new infrastructure. For example, in the energy setting, smart grids and smart meters will be able to deliver detailed information about energy usage and that is going to be used for so many wonderful things: improving energy efficiency, giving consumers more detailed information and making the grid more resilient—lots of good things. When coupled together with smart appliances, that information will become all the richer.
While the committee’s inquiry is really going to look at transport, communications, energy and water sectors, a few of my comments today will link back to the smart electricity grid, although I imagine that most of the issues will be similar for all the other types of infrastructure. As I have said, smart infrastructure is going to generate information about people, their habits, behaviours and movements. The data will be detailed and there will be lots of it. Some people are predicting that the data generated by smart power grids, for example, will be far greater than the internet. Smart appliances will be able to detail a lot about what we are doing at home—for instance, whether individuals tend to cook microwaveable meals or meals on the stove, whether they have a cooked breakfast, whether a house has an alarm system and how often it is activated, when occupants usually shower, when the TV or computer is on, whether appliances are in good condition, the number of gadgets in the home, whether the home has a washer and dryer and how often they are used, whether the lights and appliances are used at odd hours and how often exercise equipment, like a treadmill, is used. This is a lot of relatively innocuous information but it is full of possibilities if you are an enterprising business or an intrusive individual.
The risk with a rich new data source is the temptation to use that information for more than what it was originally intended. In the privacy world that is called function creep. It could mean collecting information about a person’s electricity usage for billing purposes but then on-selling that information, perhaps, to appliance vendors. The problem with that is that individuals enter into business for a particular relationship and they like to think that the business will do with the information they collect what they have been told. Obviously it is an ethical thing, but it is also a breach of the Privacy Act if you do not tell people what you are going to use the information for.
Other third parties that might be interested in some of the data could be manufacturers who want to know how the products are actually used, retailers who want to know when they should start marketing to you because your equipment is getting old and you may be in line for buying a new fridge, insurers who want to know whether security alarms were actually on or not and who was present in the home and law enforcement agencies wanting to uncover illegal operations.
A US privacy and information security lawyer said that other valuable uses will emerge. These are his words:
Customers, utilities, vendors, and third party data brokers will want to position themselves to sell AMI data or analytics, just as credit reporting agencies have done.
I am not sure whether all of you know this, but one credit-reporting agency in Australia has 14½ million records about Australians. The credit-reporting agency is doing, within the law, lots of things with that information. Potentially, smart metadata could also be used for other purposes. I think we need to think about those things.
It may not be just from a business perspective: we have nosy neighbours, vengeful ex-spouses, jealous lovers, determined stalkers—I do not personally do that, I just need to clarify that!—and burglars; they might want to intercept that data to know who is home and who is not. These are things that we need to think about. We have already seen Facebook profiles used in Australian courts to cast doubt on the good character of a plaintiff. Is it that much of a leap to imagine smart grid data being used for that purpose? It may seem a bit ‘out there’ and implausible, but many of today’s applications on the internet were implausible even 10 years ago. Australia is one of the earliest adopters of technology, and it serves us exceptionally well, but some figures are really interesting. After three years there are now more than eight million Australians who are members and regular users of Facebook—and that is only one social networking site.
So, as much as possible, we should think about the applications that will flow from smart infrastructure. Where are we going to draw the line in terms of privacy? What are reasonable and what are unreasonable secondary uses? How do we avoid that function creep? How do we ensure that data is going to be secure? To help answer some of those questions, we always talk about undertaking a privacy impact assessment. A privacy impact assessment maps the flow of information from the way it is collected to the way it is used, disclosed, stored and, ultimately, disposed of. That is one of the things I would be suggesting: that for any smart infrastructure project we undertake a privacy impact assessment. When you do think about the information flows, you may decide that there are some risks that can be mitigated, and then you will get the project right from the beginning.
PIAs are increasingly used around the world for initiatives involving personal information. The UK’s Department of Energy and Climate Change has recommended that PIAs be carried out as part of the implementation phases for smart infrastructure. In the US, a preliminary PIA on the smart grid has been done by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. That PIA has recommended improvements to the existing systems. A major advantage of doing a PIA is that you consult, and that can build confidence in the project within the community. We also think that publishing the PIA can enhance transparency—that usually will show that privacy has been taken into account as a project has been developed. If trust is lacking, individuals may view the system with suspicion. They could resist the introduction and find ways to circumvent it. Most recently, there was an announcement that we are going to have body scanning at airports in Australia. While all of us, from a security perspective, can fully understand it, there has been a little bit of a backlash within the community, because some of the scans that are in operation around the world actually show the person’s body, and people feel uncomfortable. We want people on side, so let’s build privacy into the early consideration of those sorts of issues.
We usually think that the best way of building privacy in is not in one magic fix but by having a combination of things: appropriate design and technology features, legislation and redress mechanisms and user education. As the inquiry progresses they are the sorts of things that we will look to see, hopefully, will be built in and seen as the key components for getting privacy right with our smart infrastructure projects that go ahead.
From a designer technology perspective, if you minimise the amount of data you collect you reduce the risk of something going wrong. It is a common mistake to collect more information than you actually need. For intelligent transport systems, if we can save the $9 billion I think it was that was due to wasted time by reducing traffic flows and stopping people being stuck in traffic jams, that is a fabulous outcome. But do we need to know the identity of the driver as each car goes through? We need to think about some of those sorts of things, because if you do not collect any personal information the Privacy Act does not apply.
So a bad outcome on travel would be if the technology was configured in such a way that people were discouraged from moving freely. Would people avoid using their car, for instance, to travel to get particular health services or support services if they thought there was a risk that that information would be used against them? I do not want to exaggerate it, but we need to take into account the notion of surveillance in our society and whether it unnecessarily impacts on our daily lives. We want to get the balance right.
A second element of design is to, wherever possible, allow anonymity. Another element is data separation. We should store data in such a way that it is not so easy to identify personal information. You might only link smart infrastructure data with a location or customer account when needed for billing, service restoration or other needs. You would not necessarily do that if you are analysing particular users. The person doing the analysis does not need to know, for example, how often person X had a shower.
Another element of design would be to have internal access controls so that you know who is actually accessing information. Another area would be to make sure security measures are put in place to prevent modification, misuse or disclosure. Some academics are suggesting that smart meters are built using easily obtainable hardware and software and will be subject to the normal problems of hacking and other things we face in internet life such as ‘meter bots, denial of service attacks, usage loggers, smart meter route kits, meter based viruses and other malware’. We would really like to see security measures being built into the design of smart infrastructure. That is a win-win for both individuals and businesses, because businesses can lose the confidence of their customers. There are so many examples of where that has happened around the world.
The next area is legislation. We currently have the Privacy Act, which covers most businesses in Australia as well as most of the federal public departments and agencies. But some of the states and territories also have privacy legislation. Trying to work out where your smart infrastructure fits in could be a little bit tricky because we have a patchwork quilt of laws across Australia. So I would urge you, as you develop your projects, to see that you are complying with existing privacy laws. Another element—and this is why we got a specific act, the Spam Act, to cover spam—is that it may be that a new technology develops which the community thinks should have different and extra privacy protections. But a privacy impact assessment will help you to work out how the existing law applies as well. And user education is going to be a vital element of any smart infrastructure project being successful. Allowing people to know what is happening will stop you from having as many problems.
I have tried to portray to you that smart infrastructure clearly offers many benefits, but, done badly, it has the potential to impact on individual privacy and risks undermining community confidence. So we really do need to address privacy and build it in. That is why I am so delighted the committee has recognised that this is potentially an issue and is trying to look at it now to make sure we get the best public outcome for all of us.
People sometimes wonder whether privacy is really worth protecting. But I think most of us want to live a full life and not feel we are under constant surveillance. In his book The unwanted gaze, Jeffrey Rosen said, ‘Privacy protects us in a world of short attention spans, a world in which information can easily be confused with knowledge.’ So we might reflect on how easy it could be to draw incorrect conclusions about a person based on smart infrastructure data. An argument that is often used is ‘if you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear’. But I certainly would not want to give you my credit card numbers and I would not want my personal health details published in the paper. That argument mistakenly accepts the premise that privacy is about hiding a wrong. Protecting privacy is not about being secretive or mistrustful. Having curtains on our windows does not mean we are up to no good; it just means we want to draw the line between our public selves and our private selves. So I want you to think about some of those issues as you go forward and make some magnificent contributions to our country in infrastructure, because it is needed. It is a great that the inquiry is occurring, and my office looks forward to being involved as the inquiry progresses. Thank you.
CHAIR—Thank you very much for that presentation, Karen, and for reminding us how important it is to integrate privacy issues right at the start of some of these projects. In fact, we had an example of that during the inquiry. NICTA gave us a presentation. It was a live feed from the Wollongong intersection that the minister mentioned had had smart infrastructure built into it. When we got the live feed, one of the female secretariat staff and I immediately thought: imagine if one of our husband’s cars was seen where it was not supposed to be! So privacy is obviously something that is front and centre of the inquiry’s thinking on these things. We will now break for morning tea.
Conference then divided into workshops (not transcribed)—
Proceedings suspended from 10.39 am to 12.09 pm
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