Stephen Jones (Throsby, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Development and Infrastructure) Share this | Hansard source

The starting point for all MPs in considering matters such as this is that national security is the first obligation of any sovereign government. As such, it should transcend the day-to-day rancour of partisan politics. Of course, that does not obviate the need of all members of this place to carefully scrutinise the details of every piece of legislation. It does not mean that you merely need to attach the words 'national security' to a policy proposition or a bill to ensure bipartisan support for that proposition.

Indeed, on this side of the House we reflect upon the words of the great Ben Chifley who said to Prime Minister Menzies, in the midst of our nation's greatest challenge when the war in the Pacific broke out, that he offered full support to our troops and to the government in the support of the security of our nation, but that did not mean that he would not offer patriotic criticism when he believed the details of the government's strategy, or the implementation of that strategy, had gone wrong. We, on this side of the House, offer the government patriotic criticism when we believe that they have mishandled either the debate, the drafting of the legislation or the process of that legislation through the parliament.

This is one of those circumstances where patriotic criticism is needed because from the beginning of this matter—when in August last year the Prime Minister and the Attorney-General announced their intention to introduce into the parliament legislation which would mandatorily require the retention of data—they mishandled it from beginning to end. We saw the disastrous press interview with the Attorney-General, who struggled over an excruciating 30 seconds that felt more like 30 minutes to define what metadata was all about, only to be rescued by the communications minister about a week later. At no point between then and now has the government regained its composure when attempting to deal with the public debate around this matter.

It has fallen to Labor, in many respects, to do the right thing by the parliament and by the country—to look at this legislation on its merits, to point out the obvious short fallings and to ensure that we can improve it where it needs to be improved. Had the government not mishandled the debate so tragically, they could have pointed out a raft of things which we believe need to be injected into the public debate. For example, the original proposal sought to mandate the retention of data but not the regime for accessing it. It was only after stern advocacy of Labor members of parliament that the bill was widened in its scope.

Throughout that debate, and over the last nine or 10 months when we have been gripped by this issue, at no point in time was the government able to clearly articulate to the Australian people the amount of data that is currently stored by telecommunications companies, including internet service providers and others. At no time during the debate have they pointed out that in many respects this data is already stored. What their original proposal was trying to do was to put in place a standard regime for the storage of that data. At no point during the debate did they point out that at the moment there are thousands and thousands and thousands of applications per year to access the details of that metadata. I am advised that in 2012-13 alone over 320,000—that is right, over 320,000—applications were made by law enforcement agencies and other government authorities for access to the data which is the subject of this debate before the House today. Some of those applications for data, indeed over one-third of them I am advised, came from the New South Wales Police Force.

Some of those applications were for a good cause. I do not think that there is any right-thinking member of this House or in this country who would disagree with that. For example, when the Victorian police force were trying to track down the person who was responsible for the grisly murder of the ABC journalist Jill Meagher, nobody—no right-thinking person—would have criticised the Victorian government for using metadata to be able to match up the location of the perpetrator and the location of the victim in the one vicinity, and therefore being able to relatively quickly track down the man who was subsequently found guilty of that horrible murder. No right-thinking person would say that is an inappropriate use of a law enforcement agency's access to that metadata. That was not explained sufficiently, and as a result there has been enormous misunderstanding about it. I pointed this out as a very valid access by a law enforcement agency to metadata.

Many of us can point to equally dubious requests or attempts to access that metadata. We have heard of examples of the Queensland police spying on its own employees, trying to find their location when they were not reporting for duty, for example. We have seen councils using metadata to spy on their staff.

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