Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

In rising to speak about the Passports Legislation Amendment (Integrity) Bill 2015, I start by saying that of course Labor supports this legislation. In a world where international travel continues to increase, the bill takes note of the fact that the security and efficiency of our passport regime depend on continually reviewing and keeping our legislation up to date with both our international obligations and our domestic laws. This legislation does both of those things. It also closes a loophole by creating the offence of falsely reporting a document as stolen or fraudulent.

Passports were originally about having the protection of a king or other ruler extended to the carrier. They were not initially documents for identifying citizenship but documents for safe conduct—permission for foreigners to travel within a country, sometimes only to specific places. It was not until the mid-19th century that they took on the nature of a document identifying an individual and declaring their citizenship, and it was not until after World War I that they became generally required for international travel. Once they were generally required for international travel, it became important for nations to standardise passports. The first agreement on standardising passports was reached by the League of Nations in the 1920s, but progress was slow and irregular until passport standardisation finally came about in 1980—as late as 1980—under the auspices of the International Civil Aviation Organization.

An international standard is so critical for passports because they are by their very nature a document issued by one government for the purpose of being presented to another. We saw just how important the integrity of passports is when Ahmad Saiyer Naizmand left Australia on his brother's passport—after his own had been cancelled due to security concerns—in August 2014, less than 10 months after convicted terrorist Khaled Sharrouf had done the same thing.

Australia's passport regime is, however, on the whole, robust and respected around the world. On the 2014 Henley & Partners Visa Restrictions Index Australia ranked seventh, with our citizens being able to travel without a visa to 168 other countries. All Australian governments have taken very seriously the responsibility to make sure that our passports are as secure as international standards require and as modern technology can ensure. When in government, Labor introduced the N series passport, the additional fraud countermeasures of the ghost image and retroreflective floating image, as well as images of Australia printed throughout the document, making every page unique and therefore more difficult to reproduce.

Given that passports have now become the pre-eminent identity document, we also introduced reforms to make it possible for gender diverse Australians to get passports that reflect their gender identity. Previously, sex reassignment surgery had been a prerequisite for a person to get a passport in their preferred identity. Intersex Australians had only been able to obtain a passport reflecting their gender identity if they had been born in Victoria, where birth certificates could be marked with an X. This meant that very many Australians could not get a passport reflecting their preferred gender identity. For many, the difficulty, the violation of privacy and the danger of harassment posed by explaining their gender history every time they presented their passport prevented them from travelling at all. Labor's reforms in 2011 and 2013 opened the way for gender diverse Australians to enjoy the same opportunities to travel for work, family and leisure as everyone else.

As I said earlier, in a world where international travel continues to increase, making sure that our passport regime is robust and up to date is important. Therefore Labor will support this legislation.

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