Michael Keenan (Stirling, Liberal Party, Minister for Justice) Share this | Hansard source

I am sorry to hear the shadow Attorney-General attack what has been a very important policy achievement of this government—the creation of the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission—where we took the former Australian Crime Commission, CrimTrac and the Australian Institute of Criminology and created a new and better agency. The reason we did that is that we believed it was vitally important that we create an agency that was fit for purpose in what are changing times.

Everyone would appreciate that we are living in a time where information flow, particularly information flow to our law enforcement agencies, is vitally important. We need to make sure that we have cutting-edge technologies and a cutting-edge agency dealing with that. The merger has leveraged the strengths of those three agencies and has improved their capacity to support the police and justice sector. It has also given the AIC direct access to intelligence that it would not have had as a standalone agency.

Following the merger, it is absolutely not the case that there will be a reduction in the quality or scope of research from the Australian Institute of Criminology. They form a new research branch within the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission called the Australian Crime and Justice Research Centre, which is headed by a senior criminologist researcher and overseen by an ethics committee.

As I said, the merger will not impact on the ACIC's ability to provide high-quality research to the broad range of stakeholders that have been provided research over the past 43 years. The member asked me about the determination of their priorities, but it is not up to me as minister to determine their priorities. It is up to the ACIC board. They will take advice from a non-legislative advisory body that consists of the existing Criminology Research Advisory Council members, the state and territory justice agencies and the Commonwealth Attorney-General's Department, two representatives from the law enforcement community, two members of the Australian criminal intelligence commission and a representative from the Australia and New Zealand Society of Criminology. This process will ensure that state and territory justice agencies will continue to play an important role in shaping the future direction of the merged agencies' criminological research program. Far from what the member for Isaacs was saying, the research that was previously conducted by the ARC will continue, but it will continue within a new framework within the ACIC.

There is obviously a legislative imperative that we get the administrative processes around this right, because this has actually happened. We are dealing now with the fact that the ARC has been merged into the ACIC. If it were to be the case that the opposition were to take a different view, that would complicate things and provide enormous unnecessary bureaucracy for the ACIC. Quite frankly, the ACIC has got very important things to do—tackling national security priorities and organised crime. We need to ensure that the ACIC is focused on what it needs to do—and that is protecting the security of the Australian people.

In his contribution, the member for Isaacs again made a series of outlandish and completely incorrect assertions about what we are doing with Australia's gun laws. The gun laws introduced by the Liberal government in 1996 are gun laws of which we are justifiably proud. We would never do anything to dilute the vital importance of the national firearms agreement. I do not know whether the member understands anything about the way we classify guns or not but he needs to understand that the current situation is that all lever-action shotguns are in category A—every single one. If you have a category A, licence you could literally have a 110 lever-action shotgun with a magazine capacity as long as the technology allows you. That is the current situation. That is the situation we are seeking to address.

We have been talking to the states about the way they want to classify the gun. I am hoping we will conclude that conversation. The only thing we are dealing with is the anomaly whereby a relatively high-powered gun in the form of a lever-action shotgun that could have a significant magazine capacity—in this case, over five—is going into the least restrictive category. We are addressing that.

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