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How Premier's Big Brother agency will monitor Victorians 
Premier Daniel Andrews has established a Big Brother-style data agency to monitor the activities of everyday Victorians and gather sensitive information. This is what we know about it.
Called Insights Victoria, the agency reports to Mr Andrews’ secretive private office as the “single source of truth” for public servants, monitoring everything from social media sentiment to credit card transactions.
What is the agency
The agency received $4.4m in the recent state budget. It was set up as part of the government’s Covid response in August 2020 but will continue to provide information to senior public servants and the premier’s personal staff.
The sensitive information, including how people spend their money, their levels of housing stress, health and mental health, is being curated in real time and updated every morning.
Freedom of Information documents show that while the real time dashboard uses publicly available data, it also included “commercial in-confidence” and “sensitive” data not permitted for third party or public release.
Access to all data has been given to emergency management commissioner Andrew Crisp, Chief Commissioner Shane Patton, chief health officer Brett Sutton, and Mr Andrews’s private political staff.
Who can see the data
While ministerial private offices and senior public servants have some access to the system on a need-to-know basis, Mr Andrews’s private office of political staff has unlimited access to the data.
People granted access to the system are able to download and export the data from any map or chart it produces by clicking a button.
The September note said the system would include a “behaviour and sentiments” section that covered “social media sentiments and behaviour and attitude surveys”, originally in relation to Covid restrictions.
What the future holds
However, it foreshadowed that the system could continue as an “enduring platform” that would “evolve to support cross-portfolio decision making beyond Covid-19”.
Opposition Treasury spokesman David Davis said the revelation that the premier’s political staff has access to this level of information was deeply disturbing.
 Information concerns
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DAVID DAVISOpposition Treasury spokesman 
It truly does have the feel of a dystopian society where one man and his office have overweening power buttressed by access to unprecedented streams of personal information.
Energy Minister Lily D’Ambrosio defended the state government’s use of anonymised data, saying all governments purchase its citizens’ data to stay informed.
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LILY D'AMBROSIOVictoria Energy Minister 
All governments utilise anonymised data to inform their decisions, to inform their programs, to make sure that the best decisions are made in terms of government operations.
Words: James Campbell Producer: Andrew Piva

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