Anthony Byrne (Holt, Australian Labor 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 administration and expenditure: No. 10—Australian intelligence agencies.

In accordance with standing order 39(f) the report was made a parliamentary paper.

The Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security's oversight of the Australian intelligence community, the AIC, is a key element of our national security architecture. I am therefore pleased to present this review, which covers the 2010-11 financial year. The review examined a wide range of aspects of the administration and expenditure of the six intelligence and security agencies, including the financial statements for each agency, their human resource management, training, recruitment and accommodation. In addition, the review looked at issues of interoperability between members of the Australian intelligence community. Submissions were sought from each of the six intelligence and security agencies, from the Australian National Audit Office, or ANAO, and from the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security, IGIS.

The submissions from ANAO and the six intelligence agencies were all classified confidential, restricted or secret and were therefore not made available to the public. As has been its practice for previous reviews, ASIO provided the committee with both a classified and an unclassified submission. The unclassified version was made available on the committee's website. Each of the defence intelligence agencies provided the committee with a classified submission. Each agency marked each paragraph with its relevant national security classification. This has enabled the committee for its 2010-11 review to directly refer in this report to unclassified information provided in the defence agencies' submissions.

In relation to the organisation of agency structures, the Director-General of ASIO, Mr David Irvine, told the committee about ASIO's internal reform program. He stated that the point of the reform program was:

… not simply to meet the demand for efficiency dividends and so on; it is to address what I think is a key responsibility of anyone in a position of leadership within the intelligence community today, and that is to make sure that the intelligence community is prepared for tomorrow.

One agency introduced a new and expanded organisational structure to ensure appropriate focus and risk management across all aspects of that agency's expansion in operational activities. Another agency combined two areas of its responsibilities into one so as to better focus on challenges in the current geopolitical environment.

Out of the six agencies, four reported having to accommodate legislative changes in 2010-11. In general, all agencies again stated their commitment to ensuring that their staff are informed of legislative requirements as they relate to agency functions and operations, and that where applicable they received targeted training to ensure understanding and compliance. Apart from ASIO, those agencies experiencing growth in their workforce characterised it as marginal and some agencies actually decreased their full-time equivalent staffing levels.

Now I come to my favourite subject: the efficiency dividend. The Director-General of ASIO told the committee that, in relation to the Taylor review target for staff, which was established post-September 11 to get ASIO to its full operational capability to meet current and future threats, he did not:

… believe we can reach the target without further funding. That four per cent efficiency dividend is gone forever from our budget. I do not believe we can reach that target until we get access to new funding, which may be a year or so or longer depending on the economy down the track.

Additionally, ONA stated:

The impact of efficiency dividends on small agencies can be disproportionate. ONA has been able to meet the increased annual efficiency dividend.

However, the additional 2.5% one-off efficiency dividend will put much greater strain on ONA's capacity to do its job, eroding gains that flowed to ONA from the Flood Report.

The Director-General of ONA, Mr Allan Gyngell, also told the committee that the 'new efficiency dividend will certainly impede our ability to provide the coverage which we have provided in the past'.

My time is running short, but, as I have said here in the past that I would come before this parliament and talk to it and inform it if the efficiency dividend and its continued implementation affected operability of the intelligence agencies, I believe that this report establishes that that is now happening—and that is completely unacceptable.

The agencies are tasked to protect our national security and I, frankly, find it astonishing that these agencies would have been effectively sequestered from funding to perform their tasks. I think it is disgraceful and it should be addressed. I thank the secretariat staff, Jerome Browne, Robert Little, formerly Dr Cathryn Oliff and Lauren McDougall. I commend the report to the House.

Philip Ruddock (Berowra, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak to this report. I thank the chairman for his remarks. I will further develop them in the course of my comments but let me endorse his thanks to the committee secretariat for the work that they undertake.

Our committee, it would perhaps be helpful for members to know, is not involved in reviewing the security agency's sensitive work. We may receive informal briefings from time to time but we are not to inquire into activities that relate to their efforts to protect our security as a nation. But this report is, I think, pointing to where we are exposing ourselves to quite significant risks.

A point was made by the chair in relation to what is happening with efficiency dividends. Essentially, if I can put the argument simply, organisations after the Taylor review that were seen to require substantial additional funding to be able to carry out their multiplicity of tasks in relation to counter-terrorism, for instance, and maintaining our efforts in counter espionage, were not adequately resourced for the task. We are now in a situation, if you read the page 7 of the report, where the money is being stripped out as a matter of government policy through efficiency dividends, as they are called.

It is important to read the report as a whole and I would direct people to look at what is required in relation to visa security assessments on pages 14 and 15. ASIO is now dealing with something of the order of 34,000 security assessments in relation to individuals who have arrived in Australia without lawful authority. The Director-General makes the point that, given the number of people arriving, the requirement for us to conduct security assessments, which we have been refining down and down, nevertheless still represents a considerable allocation of the organisation's resources. If you go on and read page 17 you will see that ASIO is having to undertake increased numbers of counter-terrorism security assessments. They have increased by something in the order of 11 per cent.

The report is pointing to an agency that is faced with considerable demands for its services and its workload, and the organisations are seeing their funding contract. I am not here to argue that they should get additional funding but I will argue very strongly that we may have to look at the way in which this organisation is carrying out, particularly, the issue of visa assessments. They are receiving priority because there are advocates out there arguing these issues need to be dealt with quickly. I understand why people would say that but what we are seeing is the security assessments process being refined downwards—in other words, we are being exposed to potential increased risk—and the organisation is having to speed up its assessment in relation to an area which, in my view, does not have the same priority.

In concluding my remarks today I remind people that counter-terrorism has not gone away. We have got reports of some 200 Australians in Syria at the moment who are perhaps working with al-Qaeda and likely to come back to Australia. We have seen what has happened in Boston. We have seen what has happened in London. And we ask ourselves: 'Is it all over, 10 years since 9/11? Maybe we don't face a problem anymore.' I saw some comments that suggested that. I think this report demonstrates very clearly that those problems have not gone away, our resourcing is being diminished and we need to give it a better priority. (Time expired)