Professor Richard Buckland

So yeah, it is being used and I would expect, unless there is a stop to it, if we just keep saying, yeah, that sounds reasonable, we could eventually live in an Orwellian world.

Wherever you go, you're recognised and noticed, your movements are known.

And that's an obvious problem for some people with misprotection plans, people who are trying to hide from abusive partners.

people trying to whistleblow.

We've seen some whistleblowing happening recently, the KPMG case.

They're now saying they wouldn't whistleblow again, that the fact of surveillance is actually enough to stop people wanting to speak out.

So yeah, so the world we're moving into, if this is allowed, would be a very different world.

And it'd be good for us to stop and think, is this what we want?

My understanding, and I could be wrong, is very little.

We've got some words saying this is what we're going to use it for now.

And credit to the police commissioner for saying this.

Most commissioners of police in most states do this stuff under the radar as much as they can.

It's really good that he spoke about what they're doing and he has spoken about their intentions, but he's refused to rule out other intentions.

I mean, the things you'd like to see, an independent review after a short period of time, constraints on what the surveillance could involve, the sorts of things we saw in COVID when the government tried to bring out the contact tracing app and there was a lot of alarm that the government would get everyone's location data in real time.

The government then put a whole lot of quite good restrictions on how it could be used with the sunset clause.

It would be good to see this sort of thing, but it's very hard to get anyone to put constraints on the police.

Really, both sides of politics almost outdo themselves for giving the police extra powers.

I would hope that there will be a review, an independent review.

I would hope there'll be restrictions on who can see the data.

I would hope there'd be requirements about the data being stored in a way that inside is inside, the police can't access it and that accessing get reviewed.