Mark Dreyfus (Isaacs, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a curious position that we are faced with here in that the member for Farrer, representing those opposite, has now indicated—apparently basing her speech on the report of the Senate Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs, which contains a section written by the Liberal senators who are members of the committee—that there are to be amendments moved in the Senate to the Evidence Amendment (Journalists’ Privilege) Bill 2009. We are told that we have to await those amendments to see what the detail is as to exactly how the Liberal Party proposes that the balance should be differently struck.

It is striking, Mr Acting Deputy Speaker, because as recently as 2007 in this place the then Attorney-General, the member for Berowra, introduced amendments to the Commonwealth Evidence Act that, according to the member for Berowra, were an appropriate balance of the conflicting—and recognised as conflicting—public interests which arise here. I will come back to this, but it is also striking that, despite the Liberal senators stating in categorical terms in their passage in the report of the legal and constitutional affairs committee that they did not favour protection for journalists’ sources which is reliant on the exercise of discretion, we now hear from the member for Farrer—and indeed we read this in the conclusion expressed by the Liberal senators in the Senate report—that all they really want, it would seem, is a different striking of the balance. It is worth putting this on the record, Mr Acting Deputy Speaker.

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