Alannah Mactiernan (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I think the great tragedy with this legislation, the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Amendment (Data Retention) Bill 2014, has been the way it has been introduced into this place. We were promised by Tony Abbott that we would have grown-up government, but we have had anything other than grown-up government here. We have had a Prime Minister who has, on his own admission, had a series of 'near-death experiences', who has been unable to fulfil the promises that he made to the community and who has been unable to pass a budget.

The one area that he was perceived as having some slight advantage in was the area of national security. What we have had happen here is that a very important debate that needed to happen in our community—about how we regulate data and metadata, how we control access to that data—has been suborned to the need for this Prime Minister to try to ramp himself out of the doldrums of negative territory in popularity and wrap himself in the flag of national security. In that process, he has come into this place trying to wedge the Labor Party with a completely and utterly inadequate bill and has forced everyone to work around it to try to come up with a solution. That is not the way you do grown-up government in an important area like this.

What we needed to have happen was a process of community engagement where we went out and we spoke to the community about the very real needs that we have, both in law enforcement and in national security, to access data and we engaged the community in a complex and sophisticated way about how we were going to do that. But we had the exact opposite. We had the Prime Minister looking after his own political fortunes, thinking that he could get national security to get him over the line in a challenge by Malcolm Turnbull. So he went for it, and we as a community are all the poorer for it.

I want to compliment the Labor Party. The Labor Party has sought, in this highly imperfect setting, to work out a way that we could introduce some decent community engagement with it. We insisted that this matter go to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, and I want to compliment the people that were involved in that process. I think they have done an incredible job in trying to turn a sow's ear into a silk purse.

We had a hideous process. If you wanted to be a grown-up and consensus-driven government how would you ever just lob a piece of legislation like this onto the parliament? Why would you not have established a green-paper process beforehand—and got the industry, ISPs, telcos, the community and people involved in civil liberties and law enforcement, and tried to work out some consensus? We did not have that. That is why I see this bill as one of those unfortunate legacies of Tony Abbott as Prime Minister. This is a bill that has been driven by this guy's need to try to ramp up his credentials, to try to get national security on the agenda.

We know—and the evidence presented to the joint standing committee tells us, quite clearly—that the intelligence agencies do access this data. To a much greater extent, the evidence tells us that law-enforcement agencies access this data. The intelligence and law-enforcement services see the existence of metadata and the current arrangements as absolutely critical to their ability to solve crime. There will be some dispute about the degree to which that evidence can be contested, but in a range of crimes it is pretty clear that this data has been significant.

It is also clear that we have an unregulated regime, which I do not believe is acceptable. In 2013 we had something in the order of 350,000 requests for data from over 80 agencies, so we have a lot of people out there. We have a lot of people enforcing the dog act. We have people looking at parking fines. We have a whole lot of people going in there and looking at that data. We needed to have a mature conversation with the community about this. We needed to get people to say, 'Guys, this is what we have to deal with. What do you think is the best way?' We did not get that. What we got was this piece of legislation, this shell, that enabled a media release, enabled the Prime Minister—who loves to wrap himself up in all the apparatchiks of national security—to come out and try to play that game. We as a community are poorer for it and this piece of legislation has been compromised because of it.

It is quite clear that there is a case—and a good case—for data retention. I respect the fact that our team has been able to put some boundaries around this thing—this steaming thing that was lobbed into the parliament without any warning—and that we have been able to put some serious constraints around it. We have specified that the datasets involved will have to be embedded in the legislation, not subsequently prescribed by regulation. We have limited the agencies that can have access to this. We have taken the number of more than 80 down to 20. We have required telecommunications companies to provide customers with access to their own metadata, on request. We have implemented restraints to accessing metadata for the purposes of civil proceedings. We have implemented mandatory data-breach notifications, so you get to know if there has been a breach of your metadata; a privacy alert.

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