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

Just to add to the comments of the Manager of Opposition Business, there has been extraordinary conduct by the government in relation to this inquiry. There has been extraordinary conduct in relation to an inadequate bill, despite a consensus report of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security.

I thank the Chair of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, Andrew Hastie, the member for Canning, who is here in the chamber with us. As the chair, he and the other government members of the committee, together with the Labor members, joined with us in a consensus report, like the 18 or so other consensus reports that have been made by the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security since the Abbott government was formed in 2013. Labor has cooperated with the government to ensure that bills on national security that are introduced into this parliament are, in fact, fit for purpose. More than 300 recommendations have been made on a consensus basis by the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security since 2014, as I say, in respect of some 18 different pieces of legislation, 15 of them major. To that, we can now add the 17 recommendations that have been made by the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security in respect of this bill, the Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment (Assistance and Access) Bill 2018.

The inquiry of the committee has already been shamefully interrupted and interfered with by this Prime Minister and by this Minister for Home Affairs. It should, as we have said in an additional comment to the committee's report, never occur again. At the end of the legislative process—when Labor has cooperated with the government and when Labor has cooperated with the government to ensure that the process of the committee has been accelerated in an extraordinary way—this, as members of the public listening and any members of this parliament should know, is a 175-page bill that amends, in five schedules, 10 other acts of parliament. It is a complex bill. It's a bill that introduces, for the first time in Australian law, a power for agencies and police to compulsively require innocent third parties to assist the police in their inquiries in the technology area. The compulsive powers are to be used against innocent third parties who have nothing to do with the subject of an investigation, and that alone should have warranted much, much more time being provided for consideration than the government has seen fit to do.

To add insult to injury, late on Tuesday, at about 7 pm on Tuesday, having committed in the terms that the Manager of Opposition Business has already referred to, in a letter to me from the acting Minister for Home Affairs, the Attorney-General, we were told: 'The government also commits to introducing the agreed amendments in the Senate, subject to the passage of the bill through the House of Representatives, without amendment.' We proceeded in good faith on that basis. We finalised the report of the committee yesterday. It was tabled at around 7.30 pm yesterday. It contained 17 recommendations. We awaited the government's response.

There still hasn't been a formal response of the government, but the first response of the government was to send us on an informal basis, at 6.30 this morning, most—but not all—of the amendments that are now before the House. And it's significant. We now have 173 amendments, covering some 50 pages, which the Attorney-General and the whole of the government, including the Prime Minister—who's here in the chamber and should be ashamed of himself for the disgraceful way in which he has performed over this national security bill, brought to the parliament, not fit for purpose—

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