Arch Bevis (Brisbane, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Aviation and Transport Security) Share this | Hansard source

Indeed, I am. I appreciate your wise counsel about that. The government’s response to the committee report on the matter that is the subject of my amendments was:

The Government considers that it is not appropriate for ASIO to give the prescribed authority a copy of the full statement of facts and grounds on which the warrant is based.

That is what the government said in response to the recommendation of the Joint Committee on ASIO, ASIS and DSD. The government position is that the issuing authority should not have access to the full statement of facts and grounds on which the warrant is based. That is an extremely important principle in the process that we are dealing with. The prescribed authority is a judicial person appointed by this government for the purposes of this act. They are hand-picked. They are chosen to fulfil an important role in the questioning process of those whom ASIO has an interest in. They cannot undertake their role without knowing the full grounds on which ASIO has obtained the warrant, yet the government wants to keep them blind.

The government position is that the judicial oversight should be minimised and sidelined as much as it possibly can be. That, in fact, was its preferred position. The government’s preferred piece of legislation had virtually no judicial oversight at all. John Howard took to the premiers and chief ministers a bill that would have allowed politicians and public servants to decide who gets pulled off the street and taken away, with much fewer rights, I might say, than is now the case, thanks to the efforts of a number of people in this parliament that caused the government to change its view.

Here we have a recommendation unanimously agreed to by the parliamentary committee. The government have not provided any sound response as to why that particular recommendation should not be adopted. There is nothing in what the Attorney has said today, or indeed in the official response of the government to the report, to explain why it is that they think the prescribed authority should be kept in the dark. I invite the Attorney in the course of this consideration in detail to explain to the parliament and the people of Australia why they think the government’s hand-picked appointed prescribed authority should be kept in the dark about why somebody has come before them and why ASIO has a warrant to bring that person before them.

It beggars belief that there could be a security consideration in this. We are talking about officers of the court being hand-picked by the government to fulfil precisely this role of acting as prescribed authorities in the handling of ASIO warrants. So there is no security question involved in this; the only question is one of process. Is the person who is the subject of this warrant going to be in front of a prescribed authority—a judge or a magistrate—where that judge or magistrate has information on which they can properly determine whether questions are appropriate and whether the conduct of the proceedings are correct? That is the question the Attorney has to answer. It is a question that the committee properly put before this parliament. It is a sound recommendation of the parliamentary committee, it deserves the support of this parliament, it enhances the process of warrant questioning and the government are yet to provide a shred of an argument as to why that recommendation of the committee should not be adopted. I look forward to the Attorney-General’s response to that. Indeed, I look forward to a government amendment that gives effect to it, if he has a problem with the ones I have just moved.

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