Mark Dreyfus (Isaacs, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Hansard source

by leave—I thank the chair of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security for those short statements in tabling the committee's report on the National Security Legislation Amendment (Espionage and Foreign Interference) Bill 2017 and also the committee's report on a range of powers—namely, the control order power; the declared areas power; the stop, search and seizure power; and the preventative detention order power—which is the subject of the Counter-Terrorism Legislation Amendment Bill (No. 1) 2018; that is the title of the report.

There are two matters I wish to draw to the attention of the House. The first is that, in relation to this second bill, the government has accepted the recommendation of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, which is that these extraordinary powers—the control order power; the declared areas power; the stop, search and seizure power; and the preventative detention order power—should all be treated as just that: extraordinary powers that should not be regarded as at any point going permanently into the Australian statute book. To that end, the committee recommended that a further sunset period of three years be extended to them. The government has accepted that recommendation.

There's one other matter of particular significance in this bill, which the committee has commented on and the chair has already mentioned in his remarks, and that is that two other powers, which are only peripherally the subject of this bill—namely, the questioning and detention warrant power and the questioning warrant power—are to be extended for one year. That's because the government has yet to respond in a formal sense to the committee's separate report on the questioning and detention warrant power and the questioning warrant power. That report recommended that the questioning and detention warrant power be repealed and that the questioning warrant power be retained but substantially amended. While it is considering its response to that report the government has decided that, because both those provisions sunset in September this year, it's appropriate that they be extended for a period of one year.

In particular, I would draw the attention of the House to the fact that, as has been noted, this recommendation of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security for repeal of the questioning and detention warrant power marks the first time since 2002, when this parliament legislated a whole range of extraordinary powers being given to our police and our security agencies, that a power would be repealed. As the committee has noted, because this bill does not provide a complete response, the committee and this parliament are awaiting the government's response to that recommendation. I have every confidence that the government will accept the recommendation of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security for repeal, for the first time, of an extraordinary power granted to, in this case, ASIO. It's a recommendation that follows an identical recommendation made by two reports of two separate independent national security legislation monitors. I thank the House.

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