David Jull (Fadden, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On behalf of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security I present the committee’s report entitled Review of the relisting of the Abu Sayyaf Group, Jamiat ul-Ansar, the Armed Islamic Group, and the Salafist Group for Call and Combat.

Ordered that the report be made a parliamentary paper.

by leave—The committee first considered the listing of these organisations in 2004. This is a review of the second relisting of these organisations. During a private hearing held in relation to this review, the committee discussed the process of choosing between those organisations which are selected for proscription and those which are not. This process has been touched upon in previous reviews, but the committee continues to be unconvinced as to the robustness of the process. While some organisations which now seem to be concentrating their activities in their own countries and demonstrate no links to Australia, Australians or Australian interests are proscribed, others which have membership and links to Australia have not been proscribed.

The committee was advised by ASIO that many of the organisations currently proscribed in Australia belong to a jihadist network which is global and thus, while there may not be current evidence of connections to Australia, the organisations can work into Australia through networks which can lead to people being brought into Australia. The committee was assured that other more prominent groups have not been ignored and they are being kept under constant review.

At the private hearing the committee specifically sought information about the activities of the groups under review since the last relisting of the organisations. The committee was told that where there is a lack of available new evidence regarding each or any of the organisations, this does not necessarily mean that the organisation is not still active and dangerous. A lack of evident activity may mean that the organisation is preparing for a future act of terrorism. The committee accepts that this may be the case, but it believes that it is by examination of new information that it can best decide if a relisting is warranted, and thus the committee continues to urge the Attorney-General and ASIO to provide it with as much relevant up-to-date information as possible when seeking to relist a terrorist organisation.

In view of the limited amount of information about recent activities of the groups under review, the question of the adequacy of using only information from open sources to assess listings and relistings of groups was discussed at the private hearing. The committee found that, in at least one of ASIO’s statements of reasons, the evidence for relisting from open sources was not sufficient to provide a basis for relisting the organisation and, therefore, the conclusion must be drawn that ASIO had made an independent assessment, using information that may not be open source.

ASIO advised the committee that it uses a number of sources of publicly available information on terrorist groups, but often the information from those sources is not up to date when compared to what ASIO has learned about the group through intelligence. Thus, ASIO’s statements of reasons use open-source material backed up by intelligence.

It was parliament which originally decided that only open-source material would be used when assessing the listing of a terrorist organisation and that security matters would not be discussed in a disallowance motion. This was not at the request of ASIO and the process has always relied to some extent on ASIO backing up open-source evidence with its intelligence when it decides to list or relist a group.

Using the statements of reasons and other publicly available information, the committee measured the four groups, to the extent possible, against ASIO’s stated evaluation process. The committee found evidence that at least one of the organisations has become much less active in the last two years. However, the committee will err on the side of caution with respect to these relistings and will not recommend to the parliament that any of these regulations be disallowed, even though the evidence for relisting one or more of the groups could be deemed to be inadequate for the committee to judge the case for proscription with confidence.

Regarding consultations with the community, the committee noted that, except for the Attorney-General’s Department’s media release on the making of the regulation on 3 November 2006, no actions were taken to inform the community of the relistings. The committee reiterates its previous concerns that lack of adequate community consultation means that the community is not properly informed of its obligations with regard to the relisted organisations.

In conclusion, I would like to thank the members of the committee, who continue to undertake their duties in a bipartisan fashion and who recognise the need to put the national interest and effective parliamentary scrutiny of highly sensitive matters before any partisan political interests. The work of the committee continually presents the members with the challenge of reconciling the demands of national security with parliamentary and public scrutiny. May I also thank the secretariat to this committee for their time and effort in presenting this report. I recommend the report to the House.