Tim Watts (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Communications and Cyber Security) Share this | Hansard source

I'm disappointed to be speaking on the Security Legislation Amendment (Critical Infrastructure Protection) Bill 2022 in the chamber today. It's not because the content of the bill isn't important—despite the bizarre rant we saw from the member of Mackellar today, which really reduced himself and the seriousness of the issues we are dealing with here. This bill is important; the security of Australia's critical infrastructure in the face of cyberattacks is one of the most important national challenges we face in the modern world. And, also, it's not because the contents of the bill are not urgent amidst a deteriorated cyber-environment; this government has already wasted far too much time acting on these issues as it is. I'm disappointed to be speaking in this debate today because this debate trashes an important convention on the way the parliament has engaged in debates about national security legislation dating back to the Howard government.

Labor has always sought to offer constructive bipartisan engagement to this government on defence and national security matters. It's in the national interest to do so, and that's what animates us. Unfortunately, these consistent offers of bipartisanship require a willing partner. The Morrison government lacks either the competence or the intent to treat bills like this in a bipartisan matter. There are reasons for suspicions on both fronts: on competence, this government has a growing record of bungling and incompetent mismanagement on defence and national security policy, including cybersecurity; on intent, this is a government with a growing record of trashing parliamentary conventions on national security legislation and an increasing, disturbing and damaging practice of deliberately sacrificing the long-term national interest in the pursuit of short-term political gain on defence and national security.

It's worth looking at the history to understand this. The previous Minister for Home Affairs introduced the original bill into the house on 10 December 2020. This was designed to better protect Australia's critical infrastructure assets from a growing range of cyberthreats. He did this by expanding the coverage of critical infrastructure from four sectors to 11. He introduced positive security obligations for critical infrastructure assets and enhanced cybersecurity obligations for assets deemed to be systems of national significance.

The original bill was referred for inquiry and report to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security in the usual matter. No-one doubted the need for these laws; people just wanted to get it right. And I said so in my second reading speech on the first of these bills when I noted that addressing the worsening threat was both an urgent and difficult task; it required PJCIS oversight. In September last year the PJCIS issued a bipartisan report on this bill. It's fair to say that the committee was scathing in its assessment of the original bill following an avalanche of objections by stakeholders who felt that they had been ignored in the bill's consultation process. In response to these concerns the committee, chaired by a government senator and with a government majority amongst its members, declared that it couldn't recommend that the bill be passed. The committee said:

While the Committee strongly supports the aims of the SOCI Bill, it would need a significant amount of re-drafting to pass in its entirety and respond adequately to many of the concerns expressed to it during this review. This would delay significantly the time-critical elements of the Bill.

So it recommended the bill be split in two, with the most urgent parts of the bill passed immediately and other less urgent and more complex elements of the package deferred to a separate bill. The committee report said that, once reintroduced, bill 2 should be referred to the PJCIS for review, with a concurrent review of the operation to date of the amendments to the Security of Critical Infrastructure Act resulting from bill 1.

It is this bill 2 that is before us in the chamber today. It was introduced into this place late last week. There is a longstanding bipartisan convention that bills be referred to the PJCIS and reported on before they are brought on for a vote in either chamber. There's an important reason for this. It's the same reason that we have the PJCIS: to ensure that the parties are able to work together on national security matters in the national interest. It's intended to allow for issues with bills to be scrutinised, for evidence to be weighed and for members to thrash out the issues before they are asked to take a position on them in this parliament. It's an important convention for maintaining constructive bipartisanship on Australian national security in this place, and it's a convention that has worked well since the PJCIS was established under the Howard government—one of those conventions that helps this place work better for the people who sent us here. It's a convention that helps us uphold the interest.

The Morrison government will break this convention by asking members of this House to vote on the bill before its consideration by the PJCIS. It will be the first government to break this convention since the PJCIS was established, just as, in 2019, it broke the convention that bipartisan recommendations of the PJCIS be adopted by the government. This government's willingness to trash bipartisanship and to trash important parliamentary conventions on the treatment of national security legislation sets a disturbing precedent and damages Australia's long-term national interests. Indeed, the Minister for Home Affairs had the chutzpah to lecture the Labor Party on the urgency of this bill in question time this week, adding a little partisan kicker to her dorothy dixer answer when she said:

We understand that national security is a very serious task and not one that should be risked to a party that lacks the resolve or the gravitas to tackle serious issues in a responsible and resolute way.

That comment was unbecoming of the minister and I think she knows it. But, given her invitation, let's examine how responsibly this government has treated the issues in the bill and why the issues in the bill are now so urgent. This Prime Minister's first act on coming into power was to abolish the dedicated ministerial role for cybersecurity that his predecessor established in the 2016 Cyber Security Strategy. Wasn't that a farsighted decision? It was obvious to everyone but this Prime Minister that cybersecurity would only grow in importance as an issue in national security and geostrategy. At the worst possible time, this Prime Minister destroyed all political leadership on cybersecurity within the Commonwealth. Cybersecurity became the last item on the bottom of the to-do list of the already busy home affairs minister. It was below even the Ruby Princess.

This is no exaggeration. This is what happened. Despite ransomware growing to become a billion dollar drag on the economy, during his time in the role, the former home affairs minister never once used the word in this chamber. It just wasn't on his radar. It got less attention than the Ruby Princess. It was on my radar, though. I continually spoke in this chamber on the growing threat of ransomware through 2019 and 2020 and I, ultimately, released a discussion paper calling for a national ransomware strategy in early 2021. The Leader of the Opposition had the foresight to see the ongoing and growing importance of cybersecurity to Australia's national security and kept a position within his executive team to stay focused on it. It wasn't until I had spent nearly 10 months campaigning for a national ransomware strategy that this government adopted its Ransomware Action Plan that picked up on many of the issues that we had championed in our discussion paper.

We see the same drift and lack of political leadership on cybersecurity in the treatment of the issues in the bill before the House today. The genesis of this bill was in the 2020 Commonwealth Cyber Security Strategy. The problem is that this strategy wasn't released until four months after the four-year term of the 2016 Cyber Security Strategy had expired. It took the Morrison government 10 months to conclude its 2020 Cyber Security Strategy after it had finished its initial consultations with industry. That's why this bill is now so urgent: the issues spent the better part of a year adrift in the vacuum of political leadership created by this Prime Minister before the process for developing this bill even began. That's why this government is now desperately trying to cram the passage of this bill into the limited sitting days this Prime Minister has scheduled before the next election. It's a story of bungling followed by petty politicisation—a pattern we're becoming all too familiar with with the Morrison government.

This government bungles defence and national security policy because it's out of its depth and lacks the competence to do otherwise. And this government plays politics on defence and national security because it's out of its depth and doesn't understand the consequences of doing so. Given the current defence minister is the sixth defence minister in eight years under the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government, you might forgive him for still being on his training wheels. Any sensible defence minister still learning on the job would welcome offers of bipartisan support. Instead, defence minister No. 6's ignorance and the Prime Minister's political desperation have led them to trash the national interest on these issues in pursuit of short-term political gain.

Unfortunately for them, they lack the record to be credible. This is a coalition government that has announced more submarine deals than it has delivered commissioned submarines—in fact, it has cancelled more submarine deals than it has commissioned submarines! The six bungling defence ministers of the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government have wasted eight years on failed submarine procurements, only to have to start again from scratch. Again, the first submarine commissioned by this government won't be commissioned until the 2040s. The Collins class will be 50 years old by then! As a result, this government's defence bungling has left Australia with a serious decades-long capability gap at the worst possible time.

Under the bungling mismanagement of the six defence ministers of the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government, the Future Frigates program—the second-most expensive defence project in our history—is similarly over budget, massively delayed and plagued with problems. In fact, the Navy will have to choose between running them at full power and turning the radar on. There's an echo here of the $3.8 billion Taipan helicopters procured by these six bungling defence ministers of the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government, with doors that don't work and that you can't safely exit while the guns are firing—a bit of a problem if you're dropping into a battle zone! At these Senate estimates we've heard that the six bungling defence ministers of the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government have similarly presided over yet another downgrade in the flying-hour availability of the F-35s—25 per cent down this financial year and double-digit reductions across the forward estimates.

The defence record of the Morrison government is so shameless that it now seeks to play politics with Australia's national security. The bungling of this Prime Minister and his defence ministers extends beyond procurement and into foreign policy. This is the Prime Minister who mistakenly adopted Beijing's position on Taiwan as our own in a radio interview. He then doubled down and covered up this basic fundamental mistake with dissembling when he was called out on it by the foreign policy establishment, geostrategic experts and anyone who takes this issue seriously. Instead of acting in the national interest and copping his own mistake, he damaged our credibility by asking Australian diplomats to assert that black is white on one of the most sensitive and serious issues imaginable.

Defence minister No. 6 is no better. In the most difficult of circumstances, he has repeatedly referred to Ukraine incorrectly and insultingly as 'the Ukraine', including again in question time yesterday. As Ukrainian journalist Olena Goncharova has noted:

… saying "the Ukraine" is more than a grammatical mistake—it is inappropriate and disrespectful for Ukraine and Ukrainians.

It implies that Ukraine is a subregion of Russia. Russia's menacing of Ukraine could not be more serious and demands the full attention of our defence minister, and in this week, of all weeks, the defence minister should not be ignorantly adopting the language of the aggressors in this stand-off.

All this bungling reveals a prime minister and a series of defence ministers hopelessly out of their depth on defence, national security and foreign policy. We need strength in the face of the very serious security challenges our nation faces. But, underlying this strength, we also need competence. These issues are not easy, and constructive bipartisanship often means giving those doing a difficult job the benefit of the doubt. But we cannot give this government the benefit of the doubt on the politicisation of these issues. Their ignorance is no excuse for this.

There is a reason our country has never had a prime minister so desperate and shallow as to play politics on issues this fundamental to our nation's security. These actions damage the national interest, whether this Prime Minister grasps it or not. As Dennis Richardson, a former D-G of ASIO under the Howard government, a former secretary of the Department of Defence and a former Australian ambassador to the US, said today:

Traditionally, Australian governments have seen it to be in the national interest to have a bipartisan approach to critical national security issues. It is a long time since an Australian government has actively sought to create a partisan divide on national security.

These comments came after the Prime Minister and the defence minister sunk to a new low of political desperation when they sought to politicise ASIO's annual threat assessment for partisan gain. Former Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was right when he described this behaviour as 'reckless' because it 'undermines Australian national security' and 'uses matters of grave national security purely for crass political advantage'. Malcolm Turnbull belled the cat when he noted, 'It's just a sign of desperation.'

Despite the warnings from those who know better, the Prime Minister and defence minister No. 6 have continued to debase themselves on these issues in question time. They should listen to the people whose job it is to keep this country safe. In Senate estimates this week, director-general of ASIO Mike Burgess warned those in this place that his organisation was 'not here to be politicised'. He said:

… there may be people—officials or members of parliament or ministers—who choose to misuse that.

But:

ASIO is here to serve our national interests—not sectional interests, or partisan interests or personal interests. So, hypothetically, our intelligence is there to be used for national interest purposes only, not interests of individuals—

however ambitious they may be to become prime minister or win the next election. That was my editorial addition there. I'll take the D-G's advice, and I won't make the subtext of his warning any more explicit in the House today. His message was clear enough as it is.

But I do say to those in the government: stop playing political games with national security. Respect the conventions of this House when it comes to the treatment of national security legislation like this bill before the House today. Understand that bipartisan engagement is a valuable national asset in the face of the very real security challenges that we now face. Don't desperately trash this. Don't sacrifice Australia's long-term national interest, at a time of acute danger, in pursuit of short-term political advantage. I know this Prime Minister proclaims that he doesn't think about his legacy, but that would be a very, very dark legacy to leave on leaving office.

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