Andrew Hastie (Canning, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'm very glad to rise and speak on the Security of Critical Infrastructure Bill 2018. As Chair of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, I worked very closely with my coalition colleagues and also the opposition to improve this bill. There was unanimous bipartisan support for it and I think it's an excellent bill, and the Australian people can be confident that it has the full support of this parliament.

The bill introduces new measures to protect Australia's critical infrastructure from threats of sabotage, espionage and coercion. It goes without saying that the security of critical infrastructure is essential to the effective functioning of Australian society. The government must be able to provide continuous access to essential services for everyday life in Australia, such as access to water, energy, power, communications and the like. Of course, we include ports as critical infrastructure because we do import a lot of things, particularly fuel. Almost all our fuel is entirely imported from overseas. This bill fulfils the two key tasks of the federal government, as I see it: national and economic security. The bill establishes two key measures: a register of critical infrastructure assets and a ministerial directions power. The register will enhance Australia's capability to understand exactly who owns, who controls and who has access to our critical infrastructure, and the directions power will enable a minister to issue a direction where existing mechanisms and cooperation cannot be used to mitigate national security risks. I think that's very, very important because, ultimately, the government's responsibility is to the Australian people and ensuring their interests are secured.

Before I move on, I want to frame this bill in the larger strategic context. A lot of Australians see the last 15 or so years as having been defined by 9/11. That looms large in the public mind. It certainly does for me. However, I think more pertinent now to Australia's situation are the events of 1 April 2001, and let me tell you why. It was the day of Hainan Island incident, where a United States Navy EP-3E Aries signals intelligence aircraft collided in mid-air with a People's Liberation Army Navy fighter jet. It sparked an international dispute between the United States and the People's Republic of China and was an early test for President George W Bush, only 10 weeks into his first term.

I needn't go over the details of that, but it was a significant incident. The US crew were forced to land on Hainan Island and were detained for about 10 days before being released back to the US. It's important, because I think it signified China's rise as a strategic competitor to the United States in the Asia-Pacific region. That rise has been happening for a lot longer than public discussion might suggest. Only in the last two years have we really started talking about China, its economic importance to Australia and, more importantly, some of the national security implications we're now dealing with. Hainan Island sits in the South China Sea, the maritime zone whose political reality China has changed through the building and militarising of artificial islands. That's the important strategic context.

China is also setting about expanding its economic interest through the 'One Belt, One Road' initiative. That involves the acquisition of infrastructure in other countries. Very recently a port in Sri Lanka went into Chinese hands. There was a lot of public unrest or anxiety about the 99-year lease of the port of Darwin a few years ago. Considered in that strategic framework, this bill is very important, which is why I support it. I share the unease at the idea that foreign states would have almost exclusive control and ownership of critical infrastructure like ports, considering our fuel security situation. We're almost entirely reliant upon the importation of liquid fuel, both crude and refined.

This bill mitigates the risk of foreign ownership. Australia has always been a net recipient of foreign investment. Our wool industry kicked off with foreign investment. Our resources sector has grown through foreign investment. In Canning we have a lot of foreign investment. I have two Alcoa refineries and an Alcoa mine. I have Newmont goldmine, Australia's largest. There's nothing wrong with that, but the key point is that where there is foreign investment in our critical infrastructure that provides essential services, the government should be in a position to mitigate that. We are in the middle of a discussion about foreign interference, espionage and sabotage. As a bit of backdrop to what we're discussing, I have here the Hansard evidence ASIO's Director-General of Security, Mr Duncan Lewis, gave to the PJCIS in Melbourne, 10 or so days ago:

Hostile foreign spies are currently conducting harmful activity against Australia on an unprecedented scale … Put simply, there are more foreign spies today, and they have more ways of attacking us … Our open democracy and the features of globalisation involve hitherto unimagined movement of money, movement of people, movement of information—which I hasten to say enrich our country and our society but nevertheless provide an unprecedented array of vectors that foreign spies can and do use to attack us. The most obvious example of this is the widespread use of the cyber vector to conduct espionage and interference.

As we grow in our technological sophistication, particularly with critical assets, we become increasingly vulnerable to cyberattack. He went on to say:

Cyber is a vector that simply did not exist during the previous high point of intelligence activity against Australia, the Cold War. The point here is that we are in a new and unexplored cyberthreat environment. Similarly, cheap and easy international travel, globalised communication technologies, and the global trade and finance systems that we take for granted in our modern society have also opened the door for hostile foreign spies, and they are, necessarily, ruthlessly exploiting these vectors to covertly harm our Australian interests.

This bill is part of a larger suite. There is still legislation before the committee, and it would be improper to discuss that, but this bill came out of the committee with unanimous bipartisan support. It's designed to protect our national interest and critical infrastructure.

Before I close I want to talk a bit more about the need to protect our economic security. It's just as important as our national security. Of course, in the foreign interference and espionage legislation there is a new offence that targets theft of trade secrets, and I think that will very nicely complement what we have here in this Security of Critical Infrastructure Bill. The point that the director-general of ASIO made is that we're increasingly vulnerable to cyberattacks and a lot of our critical infrastructure assets have increased cyberconnectivity and a reliance on global supply chains, with many services now offshore. So the bill does protect assets in the electricity, water, port and gas sectors. Importantly, it does not apply to the telecommunications sector, which is covered by other legislation that passed last year—another piece of legislation that received strong bipartisan support.

Before I close I do want to talk a bit about the fuel security recommendation that we made as a committee. I have mentioned already we're almost entirely reliant upon the importation of liquid fuel, both crude and refined, and so as a committee we are concerned when we see our fuel stocks. They sit at about 47 days as of November 2017. When you think about the US, they have something like 330. Greece has about 130 days. New Zealand has 90. The UK is somewhere in the vicinity of 200 days. When you consider us and benchmark us against other Western democracies, we are well behind the pack. And so one of the recommendations to come out of our review into this bill was that the Department of Home Affairs in consultation with the Department of the Environment and Energy and the Department of Defence look at our fuel supply chain and mitigate the national security risks that are present. I think it's important to note that most of the threats to our liquid fuel security come from foreign governments and, therefore, securing it requires a government response. We can't just rely upon the market. I think that is foolish thinking to say the least.

In any case, to sum up: this is a good bill. It addresses many of the concerns that the Australian people have raised through their MPs and senators over the last few years, particularly as we've had public discussions around the sale of the port of Darwin, for example, and so I commend this to the House. Thank you very much.

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