A parliamentary committee has been labelled "dangerously naive" after giving its tick of approval to electronic health records for all Australians.
A Senate inquiry has recommended that proposed legislation to reboot Australia's current e-health system and switch it from an opt-in to an opt-out model be passed by the Senate.
It said tough new penalties would address fears around privacy and concerns that sensitive medical details could be accessed or used inappropriately.
Privacy foundation slams 'dangerously naive' Senators
Australia's peak privacy body has lambasted the country's Senate for being ignorant about the implications of the country's new e-health records.
What was once called the Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR), re-branded My Health Record this year to give it a smiley face, is the government's attempt to dragoon Australians into a national health database.
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Last year, 38,718 Australian passports were reported to have been stolen or be missing, up from 38,689 the previous year.
There aren't any formal proposals on the table yet, but Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop is keen on the idea, which came out of an innovation challenge run by her department.
Australians could soon become the first citizens without a paper copy of their passport
Australia airports now feature SmartGates to read digital passport information, but more data could soon end up in the cloud.Australia and New Zealand have a very close relationship (New Zealand is often referred to as Australia’s Canada) and citizens between the two countries already are already free to travel and live in each country, but now still require a passport to cross each others’ borders; under the trial Australian and New Zealand citizens would be free to travel to the other country without the use of a passport but with the biometric scanning at the border.
On Wednesday, federal Health Minister Sussan Ley announced two new trials of the so-far-unsuccessful, personally controlled electronic health record – rebadged as “My Health Record”.
These will run at the start of 2016 in rural north Queensland and the Blue Mountains in New South Wales.
The key difference from the current system is that enrolment has been switched to opt out rather than opt in. This means any of the one million patients included in the trials who don’t want their data shared will have to actively ask not to be part of the system.
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