Arch Bevis (Brisbane, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

On behalf of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, I present the committee’s report entitled Annual report of committee activities 2008-2009.

Ordered that the report be made a parliamentary paper.

Since the last annual report, which I had the privilege of tabling in this parliament just on a year ago, the committee has tabled four further reports. In addition to those tabled reports there are a number of active reviews underway. The committee has also been engaged in the course of the last year in an important continuing round of briefings and visits with the various agencies involved in national security and intelligence work on behalf of the Commonwealth. The committee has received private briefings from the Defence Security Authority. The committee has also received a private briefing from Mr Duncan Lewis, AO—well known to many members in this parliament and outside—the newly appointed National Security Adviser. The committee has also received briefings from representatives of the Office of National Assessments, the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet and, of course, all of the other agencies involved in Australia’s intelligence and security community.

There is one matter raised in this annual report review which is the subject of a recommendation that I should make some comment on. When the committee did its review of administration and expenditure No. 6, that draft report was provided to the agencies on 10 March 2009. It was not until some three months later that we received the final vetting letters from the relevant ministers agreeing to the details. Those provisions may not be well known by the public, or indeed around this parliament, but the act does require the committee to provide a copy for vetting by the relevant agencies to ensure that no information that might be regarded as security sensitive is inadvertently published. That is a practice that the committee endorses.

However, the delay of three months does mean that there is not a timely capacity for the committee to report its views on these matters to the parliament, and there is a recommendation, which I would commend to the government, to put in place procedures to allow those reports of the committee to be vetted within one month of their presentation to the relevant ministers. Typically, those matters that do arise, where there are issues or suggestions from agencies or ministers as to possible changes, tend not to be matters of great moment and are fairly easily dealt with, but it does delay the capacity of the committee to report fully to this parliament when those vetting procedures take three months, as occurred during the course of the last year.

The committee during the course of the year also inquired into some matters raised in the Senate concerning intercept warrants. Concern was raised by one of the senators there about what appeared to be an extraordinarily large number of warrants being issued in Australia compared with other jurisdictions such as the United States. I would commend that section of the report to all members interested in these matters, because it provides a useful comparison and demonstrates how easily the media, the public and indeed members of this parliament can misconstrue or misunderstand simple or superficial information. I guess the easiest way of conveying that difference is to note, as the report does, that in the United States the average number of people whose communications were intercepted per order was 92—that is, 92 people had their communications intercepted on average for every single warrant that was issued. The system in Australia would simply not allow that to happen. If you multiply the US number of warrants by 92, of course, you get a dramatically different picture of what has occurred.

The committee has continued to be well served by its secretariat. I thank Robert Little and the other members of the secretariat who provide the committee with support. I also want to again thank the members of the committee. It is a pleasure to serve on this committee and it is a privilege to chair it.

Finally, I report that the committee was represented at the 2008 International Intelligence Review Agencies Conference. This is an important international gathering. It was actually started some years ago by Australia and next year will return to Australia—we will host that international conference. It saw participants last year from Belgium, Canada, New Zealand, Poland, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States, and hopefully next year we will see a number of other participants here in Sydney.

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