Wednesday, 3 December 2025

 Alison MARCHANT (Bellarine) (10:59): I rise to speak on the Legislative Assembly Economy and Infrastructure Committee’s inquiry into workplace surveillance, which I had the honour of chairing. This report and the inquiry really go to the heart of the fairness of Victorian workplaces. Through this inquiry we certainly exposed the reality that for many workers – who already see it and know it in their own workplaces – the workplace surveillance that is conducted by employers has gone far beyond just CCTV cameras or maybe the time clock that you might have when you come in out of work hours. But this human impact of workplace surveillance is certainly being felt.

Throughout the inquiry we had excellent witnesses and submissions, but I would like to indicate and maybe share a couple of those stories, particularly from the Victorian Trades Hall Council, who gave voice to actually what workers are experiencing and how the impact is being felt by them. They stated that workers said things like ‘I felt like a prisoner at work’ and ‘Constant monitoring’. A retail staffer who stopped to talk to a colleague felt guilty – felt like a naughty child at school. And someone said, ‘I’m on my feet all day, and even having a sip of water makes me feel guilty.’ These are absolutely lived experiences. It erodes trust and absolutely has an impact on workers’ mental wellbeing.

This inquiry also then talked about the future: what does the future look like in our workplaces? I am old enough to remember the show that was on television when I was a teenager or a young child called Beyond 2000, and they would have the next technology that was coming through. I am sure it was something like X-ray vision or, you know, electric cars and things that would fly, and you would think ‘Wow! The future is just going to look absolutely incredible. We won’t know it.’ I know that we now wear devices – watches that might tell us our heartbeat and some things like that. I am not really up with all the technology that the kids are into these days, but what we absolutely heard in the inquiry was that the technology was becoming so advanced that there are devices now that you can wear on your head, like a headset or in a cap and they will track your brain activity and your brain waves.

We had a witness Dr Allan McCay, who is an academic fellow at the Sydney law school, University of Sydney; co-director at Sydney Institute of Criminology; and president of the Centre for Neurotechnology and Law. He certainly brought attention to these electronic devices that can monitor your brain activity. That all sounds very much like Beyond 2000 and what we might see, but this is real – it has a positive. Some of these technologies are being used to treat Parkinson’s, epilepsy and hearing loss. They certainly have very much a positive impact on those that might be going through those types of disorders.

But it also gave us food for thought about how workplaces are using this technology. It may be as simple as a truck driver with a mining company that would wear this technology. It may beep at them if the technology is picking up fatigue, for example. Now, we might say that is a really great safety initiative, and we certainly want our workplaces to be safe, but this witness Dr Allan McCay did say there are some warnings here in that what can be described as your mental privacy and the issue of the privacy of the data that is being collected. There were 18 recommendations. The government has responded to these: 15 of those 18 recommendations have been supported in principle, and I am really looking forward to the government now undertaking the work to see what other further reforms and legislation might be needed in workplace surveillance.

I do want to mention, with the little time I have, that the opposition members had a minority report and sort of cautioned against some of the reforms and recommendations that we had suggested. I want to address these respectfully, but the stakes are way too high to leave these claims unchallenged. They basically had a do-nothing policy. While that might be fine for them, there still is harm currently now in our workplaces. I really look forward to the government continuing the work to make sure that we have safe and great workplace surveillance laws.