Robert McClelland (Barton, Australian Labor Party, Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the amendments be agreed to.

I will make a few brief comments. The amendments that were agreed to by the Senate respond to recommendations made by the Senate Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs. They do so by removing the provisions in the bill that would have enabled devices to be added to device based named person warrants after they are issued and, secondly, strengthening the reporting requirements of the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act by requiring more detailed reporting in relation to services intercepted under a named person warrant as well as additional reporting on the total number of devices intercepted under a named person warrant.

This legislation is complex. It involves bringing our law enforcement techniques into line with modern technology, and having regard, in particular, to how those who would threaten the safety of Australians, either by committing crimes or through potential acts of violence motivated by reasons of political or religious extremism, are dealt with in the context of their access to and use of these technologies on the one hand and, on the other hand, providing for the legitimate privacy interests of Australians.

The other issue that the legislation needs to carefully balance is the realisation that increasingly we are connected with the rest of the world necessarily electronically, through the internet in particular, with the need to realise that we—that is, our government agencies, be they military, intelligence or law enforcement or agencies dealing with critical infrastructure—are vulnerable to electronic interference and, indeed, electronic espionage and electronic attack, whether that be by way of the unleashing of viruses or the unleashing of trojans that are then placed in the recipient computer to feed back on an ongoing basis information that is contained in those computers.

It would be naive in the extreme for legislators—and indeed commentators and people in business—not to recognise that reality. There would be very few people, I believe, who did not have a problem on their home computer at least, if not their office or business computer, with a virus and who did not do a basic computer check to discover that there had been any number of ‘cookies’—to use the vernacular—planted on their computer. It is a reality. In the context where 90 per cent of critical infrastructure in Australia is privately owned, it is entirely reckless for us to ignore that that infrastructure should be protected from the prospect of electronic attack. These are complicated issues. The bill as amended by the Senate provides for our intelligence and law enforcement agencies, that is, internet supervisors of those agencies, to have access to communications coming into those agencies for the purpose of determining whether their internet network has been the subject of attack, and addressing that. That is important and supported by the Senate.

But where we need to go in terms of work in progress involves balancing what is a clear and pressing need to have regard to measures that are required in the private sector to enable the private sector, particularly those corporations that have or are involved in the administration of critical infrastructure, to have sufficient means to protect their infrastructure and indeed their interconnectivity and their own internal networks from electronic attacks. So, the purpose of my comments is to indicate that this is a work in progress for the purpose of further consideration over the next 18 months. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.

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