Matt Thistlethwaite (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

Can I endorse the comments of the chair and thank her for the very fair manner in which she chaired this inquiry. The recommendations of the committee are unanimous and have the support of the Labor members of the committee. As the chair has pointed out, section 313 of the Telecommunications Act provides Australian government agencies, including state government agencies, with the ability to request internet service providers to help and do what is reasonably necessary to disrupt the operation of illegal online services by blocking access to websites. These requests are not the subject of a warrant or a court order; they simply can be made by a government agency, and ISPs are asked to cooperate. Subsections (5) and (6) of section 313 provide an indemnity to those ISPs that do comply with the request for action in blocking.

There is no doubt that there is a need for provisions such as these in Australian law, and that is certainly supported by the evidence that was presented to the committee, particularly in respect of child sex abuse sites. Evidence was presented to the committee that Interpol operates and maintains a list of child sex abuse sites and, between 1 July 2011 and 15 October 2011, Telstra blocked 84,000 attempts by Australians to access child sex domains on the list. So the evidence clearly presents that there is a requirement for these types of provisions. The provisions are also used to prevent financial fraud. I am told by evidence before the committee that, over the period 2011 to 2013, there were a total of 32 requests made using section 313. Twenty-one of those requests were by the AFP in respect of child sex abuse sites, 10 of the requests were by ASIC in respect of financial fraud, and a single request was by the Attorney-General's portfolio in respect of terrorism grounds. So the need is clearly there.

If the need is there, why was the inquiry conducted? The inquiry was conducted because in March 2013 the Australian Securities and Investments Commission made a request to certain ISPs to block fraudulent websites, but in doing so they inadvertently blocked over 1,000 legitimate websites, including Melbourne Free University, which is no doubt a very big business that operates in Australia. The problem was that it took several days for Melbourne Free University to discover that their website had been blocked. Then it took a further several days for the block to be lifted. Under the provisions as they currently exist in the act, there is no recourse for Melbourne Free University—or the other 1,000 or so websites that were blocked. That became the subject of a ministerial referral to our committee.

In summing up the findings of the committee, the key is balance. We all understand the need for these provisions but the necessary guidelines need to be put in place to ensure there is balance and to ensure that appropriate safeguards are undertaken before blocks and checks are made. That is the subject of the committee's recommendations.

Based on the evidence presented to the committee we made two recommendations. The first is for whole-of-government guidelines to be developed so that the balance can be right and so that the appropriate checks are undertaken by agencies before blocks are made. They include: internal policies consistent with the guidelines; clearly defined authorisations at a senior level before a block is undertaken; defining the activity subject to the disruption; industry and stakeholder consultation; the use of stop pages so that when a block is made it goes up on the page indicating the agency that has requested the block, the reason for the block, an agency contact and an avenue for review; public announcements, where appropriate, through media releases and the like; and a review of the appeal process and reporting arrangements. Of course we have also recommended that agencies have the requisite technical expertise.

Once again, thank you to the other members of the committee. Thank you in particular to the secretariat for the excellent job that they did, and in particular to all of those Australians and organisations that made very thoughtful submissions to this inquiry. I think it is fair to say in these recommendations we have got the balance right.

See this speech in context