Andrew Wallace (Fisher, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The first duty of any government is ensuring the safety of its citizens. That's a phrase that's often used in this place—one that can be sometimes overused—but its principle remains paramount. Whether it be protecting us from crime, combatting foreign agents or cybercriminals who want to undermine our interests or defeating terrorists who want to destroy our way of life, defending our security must be our government's first priority. This government has always understood that responsibility and prosecuted it with dedication and rigour. This is a government that just last year provided an extra $321.4 million for the Australian Federal Police and, in total, has increased funding for law enforcement, intelligence and security agencies by $1.5 billion. This government is funding 100 more intelligence experts, more than 100 more tactical response and covert surveillance operators and a further 100 more forensic specialists at the forefront of the fight against crime and terrorism. This government has passed eight tranches of national security legislation to strengthen our law enforcement and intelligence agencies and to give them the tools they need to deal with terrorists. We have given the ADF the power to target international terrorists with lethal force and given our law enforcement officers the power to arrest homegrown terrorists before their plots come to fruition. We've invested $100 million in grassroots crime prevention projects and $45 million in counter-radicalisation programs to try to suppress these threats before they are fully developed.

However, this government also understands that the threats we are facing are evolving and growing in complexity and sophistication. Since 2014, Australian intelligence and law enforcement agencies have successfully disrupted 14 imminent terrorist attacks and charged 85 individuals with offences relating to terrorism. Just one of these attacks, a rigorously planned plot against an A380 airliner leaving Sydney, would have led to hundreds of deaths had it not been narrowly averted. We expect the volume of passengers entering our borders to increase by 22 per cent in just the next three years, while the ongoing instability in the Middle East continues to provide a source of potential terrorists and training. At this point, I'd also like to send a huge shout-out to our armed services, our men and women in the ADF, who are doing an absolutely sterling job in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Middle East more broadly to help keep this country safe.

New technology and online channels like powerful mobile encryption, the dark web and advanced cyberwarfare techniques have given state and non-state actors alike new tools to threaten us. Research conducted by Telstra, for example, shows that as many as 60 per cent of organisations in Australia suffered some sort of cyber attack in 2016 alone. However, the government has shown through Operation Sovereign Borders that national security problems of huge scope and considerable complexity can be overcome through a coordinated and integrated approach. This dramatically successful operation has involved the cooperative work of 16 separate agencies. It shows what can be achieved when our security, law enforcement and intelligence agencies work together in a close-knit, common effort.

That success and that experience has led the government to institute the Department of Home Affairs to bring together the management and coordination of our nation's national security, intelligence and emergency management agencies. It's a model that has proved its value overseas. And, like the UK Home Office, the Department of Home Affairs is now able to provide far-reaching strategic planning and policy development that incorporates knowledge from all our myriad experts. It also provides the best possible distribution of resources and closest possible coordination between ASIO, the AFP, the Australian Border Force and the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission to ensure that Australia is a safer and more secure place.

The minority who oppose this move, however, point to the many weighty and serious responsibilities that are being concentrated in the hands of one minister, the former Minister for Immigration and Border Protection and now Minister for Home Affairs. Personally, I can think of no-one I would rather have responsible for our nation's internal security. The minister was a Queensland police officer for a decade, protecting not only Queenslanders, in the drug and sex offenders squads, but all Australians, through the National Crime Authority. The minister saw and combatted the worst of crime in our society, and he understands what works. That knowledge and that experience have been manifest in his tireless and resolute work on national security to date.

This government's amendments to the Migration Act allow the minister to cancel visas of noncitizens who are convicted of a serious crime. Those we have welcomed into our country but who have chosen to commit a crime with a sentence of more than 12 months in prison or who have chosen to commit a sexual offence against a child do not deserve to be allowed to stay in Australia, and our duty to protect our citizens requires that they should be removed. The government's new law has allowed this minister to drive a 12-fold increase in the number of these visa cancellations and keep our society safe from people who have chosen to so outrageously abuse our hospitality. Since December 2014, when this minister gained responsibility for the relevant portfolio, the coalition government has cancelled the visas of over 3,000 dangerous criminals. That includes 61 murderers, 135 rapists, 260 child sex offenders, 500 drug dealers and 170 criminal motorcycle gang members. These deportations have made my community of Fisher on the Sunshine Coast safer, as they have for every community across this country. Once again, there are 3,000 dangerous criminals who, through this process alone, can no longer threaten our citizens because of the decisive and robust action of this minister.

But the minister has gone further and driven the extension of this important power to take the strongest possible action to protect us from terrorists trained overseas. By leading the legislation to give the government the power to revoke the citizenship of any dual national who engages in a terrorist act, engages in hostile activity with a terrorist organisation overseas or is convicted of a terrorist act or other terrorism-related offence, this minister has shown that he is not afraid to make the difficult decisions needed to protect our cherished way of life. Critically, this minister has also spent almost 2½ years being responsible for Operation Sovereign Borders. For more than 800 days he has ensured that not one person has arrived in Australia illegally by boat. In this way, he has saved thousands of lives and many millions of dollars while helping to keep closed 17 unnecessary detention centres. Just yesterday we saw again how important his action has been, with a people smuggler's boat carrying 131 people stopped by Malaysian authorities while on its way to Australia.

He has displayed strength in pursuit of our security, but that strength has been accompanied by compassion. By protecting the integrity of our border protection and citizenship systems, this minister has helped the government to accept more refugees under our already generous humanitarian program, rising to 18,750 next year, not to mention permitting a special intake of 12,000 Syrian refugees. So, the current Minister for Home Affairs has amply and consistently demonstrated the strength, the commitment, the decisiveness and the compassion needed to shoulder the broad and serious responsibilities that come with this new portfolio.

But, as a lawyer, I know that we must legislate not for the minister of today but for all the ministers who might come in the future. There must be safeguards in place to ensure that these centralised responsibilities will never be misused. The government recognised this need and from the beginning has ensured that the Attorney-General will continue to have a very powerful oversight role. However, it was the recommendation of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security that these safeguards be strengthened even further. The government considered these recommendations and it has responsibly and comprehensively taken them on board. That is why we have proposed these additional amendments. Transparency and clarity are at the foundation of proper oversight.

Historically, it has often been the case that, where responsibilities are unclear, opportunities can emerge for the unintended and unwarranted expansion of powers. This bill therefore contains a range of measures to ensure that there is absolute clarity as to which minister is authorised to execute which powers and which minister should be held to account. First, the government's amendments embodied in this bill will ensure there is clarity as to the fact that it is the Attorney-General and not the Minister for Home Affairs who holds the key powers under the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security Act and the Independent National Security Legislation Monitor Act. Further, the bill amends 36 other pieces of legislation to ensure that it is clear when it is the Minister for Home Affairs, the Attorney-General, other ministers, secretaries or departments that should exercise a wide range of powers and responsibilities.

The government has also identified that it is critical to proper oversight that the Attorney-General continues to be responsible for issuing ASIO warrants and authorising special intelligence operations. We've also accepted the joint standing committee's recommendation that this fact needs to be made clearer. This bill therefore amends the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Act and the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act to reflect that important responsibility. Likewise, this bill's amendments will ensure that it is only the Prime Minister who is able to request that the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security undertakes an inquiry under section 9 of the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security Act.

This bill will help us to make Australia safer—safer from crime, from cyberattack, from people smugglers, from terrorists and from those who would seek to undermine our way of life. Facilitating the creation of the Department of Home Affairs will protect our national security and our prosperity at a time of increasingly complex and evolving threats. However, by clarifying the lines of responsibility and cementing the critical oversight, accountability and integrity roles of the Attorney-General, this bill will also make Australia safer by respecting the rights and liberties of all Australians.

I started this speech by saying that the duty of every government—its first duty—is to protect its citizens. This is a bill, a very important bill, that seeks to proactively measure and achieve that very goal at a time of sinister new threats. For that, I commend the bill to the House.

Peter Khalil (Wills, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

  If we are genuinely to hold fast to the fundamental and most basic principles of democracy and the rule of law, we cannot remain silent—we should not remain silent—when faced with one minister collating and consolidating so much power to himself. The member for Fisher, who's leaving now, reads out the CV of Peter Dutton, the Minister for Home Affairs, as if that absolves the government of the necessity of proper scrutiny around the unchecked powers of the home affairs minister. On this side, Labor have been consistent in the argument that we've put forward that this is overreach and that the Minister for Home Affairs shouldn't just be given a rubber stamp for this unchecked power.

I know the Home Affairs and Integrity Agencies Legislation Amendment Bill 2017 is an administrative bill to some extent. In its original form it amended four current acts with the intention to give administrative effect, where required, to legislative changes around the establishment of the new Home Affairs portfolio. It was introduced to the House on 7 December 2017, last year, and then the government referred the bill to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security. There were recommendations from that committee's first report, and then the government went ahead and produced a large set of further amendments to the bill, amending 33 further acts. There was constructive negotiation between our shadow Attorney-General, Mark Dreyfus, and the government's Attorney-General, and these amendments were submitted to the intelligence committee for further inquiry.

The creation of the Home Affairs portfolio, including the department, has been largely realised through the machinery of government, and on this side we've taken the position that specific organisational changes to government departments are typically a matter left to the discretion of the government of the day. That's part of their machinery of government. So that's the position that we've taken. However, this should not exempt elements of the government's proposal from genuine scrutiny. The specific changes, for example, to the remit of the Attorney-General's portfolio deserve rigorous scrutiny.

Many of us here have expressed significant concern with respect to the concentration of power within the Home Affairs portfolio. I've been one of those. I've previously voiced concerns in this place that the establishment of the Home Affairs portfolio has been an opportunity to, if you like, collate and consolidate unchecked executive power to the minister.

It's Labor's intention to ensure that the government is held accountable to its initial commitment, made by the Prime Minister during the bill's second reading speech, about the enhanced role of the Attorney-General. I think it's important to note the speech made by the Prime Minister where he identified how the Attorney-General would have an expanded portfolio, taking on 'a suite of new oversight responsibilities with our intelligence community', but would still retain his responsibility for the administration of the criminal justice system. So Labor understands that the expansion of the Attorney-General's role is a necessary part of the creation of Home Affairs and the Attorney-General's role as first law officer. This is a view, of course, supported by the Law Council of Australia, which supported the changes made in this bill during the council's submission to the parliamentary joint intelligence committee.

While we support the substance of the bill in that respect, I think it's important to use this debate to shine a light on the abysmal way in which this government has actually gone about establishing this new department. There were a lot of articles written in the media. There was one in particular by Karen Middleton for The Saturday Paper which pointed out how changes relating to ASIO were being kept from public view, discussing how the legislation seems to no longer be subject to public scrutiny before it is passed. We are very concerned on this side of the House about the lack of transparency. We hope—and it may well be a forlorn hope—that the government reviews its processes to ensure that any changes undergo the appropriate level of public and parliamentary scrutiny.

I concur with the comments made by the shadow Attorney-General, Mark Dreyfus, earlier when he said that the new Attorney-General clearly does not understand the bipartisan role that the intelligence committee fulfils. Even the former Attorney-General for this government, George Brandis, claimed in a speech in February that the creation of the Department of Home Affairs was 'unsettling', to use his word. I've said on numerous occasions that we should all be worried by this government's securitisation, particularly of that part of the immigration portfolio under Home Affairs. Troublingly, as I pointed out, there is a large amount of undefined or unchecked executive power under the new department.

I just point out that the fact that the member for Fisher read out Mr Dutton's CV is irrelevant. It doesn't matter who the minister is. He misses the point. The point is not who the minister is. It could be Peter Dutton. It could be Mother Teresa. That doesn't matter. What matters is the structural powers that are given to that minister and making sure that the powers can be checked by the parliament and that they are not just given to a minister to concentrate his ability to dominate an entire portfolio, in the sense that he has discretionary powers that are more than even those of the Prime Minister. That's too much power for one person.

In some respects this minister has built an empire through blatant disregard for the democratic process. According to the 2017 report of Liberty Victoria's Rights Advocacy Project, the Minister for Home Affairs, as I said, holds more power than any other minister, including the Prime Minister. We can't abide this, and we urge the government to put a stop to Minister Dutton's power-grabbing efforts. While the minister's power expands, his competence has been persistently called into question. An independent review of the Department of Immigration and Border Protection, looking at the circumstances of the detention of two Australian citizens, was released under freedom-of-information laws earlier this year. The review revealed systematic problems in Minister Dutton's management of onshore detention centres, resulting in two Australian citizens being wrongly detained in immigration detention. Between 2016 and 2017 the then Department of Immigration and Border Protection wrongfully held two Australian citizens for 97 and 13 days respectively. That's right: this government wrongfully held Australian citizens in immigration detention. For all Minister Dutton's arrogant swagger and bluster about management of these centres, about border security, about being tough, the facts are that the incompetence is utterly staggering.

There's been a lot of debate in this House around migration matters in recent months. There is more of it in the debate on this bill. During the debates on several pieces of migration legislation that we have had before us, I have noted my concerns around immigration policy under this government and the tendency of this government to securitise the immigration portfolio itself and the policy around it, particularly under the new Department of Home Affairs. Of course Labor and I support the need to keep Australia safe and secure. Indeed, I've spent much of my professional life doing exactly that. We also understand that security is only one element, albeit it an important element, of migration policy. But it's a much more complex portfolio than that. New migrants contribute economically, socially and culturally. The immigration portfolio has to have elements that are economic, social and cultural to facilitate the successful settlement of migrants in this country. There are many immigrants, including refugees and migrant workers who go on to become permanent residents and citizens, who become entrepreneurs themselves and make great contributions to Australia's economy. I feel and I see that there is a real lack of focus on those elements of the immigration portfolio, and that is a concern. We've seen several research papers that touch on this and the importance of new migrants in, for example, productivity in Australian agriculture and a whole range of sectors. The government focuses attention on security, at the expense of these other important elements. While security and keeping Australia safe are important, that's only one part of a much more complex portfolio. In that respect, I would say that the government have failed to successfully oversee the immigration portfolio and policy for this country.

While we don't reject any of these amendments, on the basis that the organisation of government departments is a matter for the discretion of the government of the day, we do highlight and hold the government accountable for their incompetence when they get it wrong—that's part of our role as an opposition—and the failures and the lack of transparency that have come to define this portfolio. In what is typical of the lack of substance that characterises this government, even views expressed by the intelligence community have noted that the establishment of this department seems to be much more about political grandstanding than actual substantive change. Even the Prime Minister has acknowledged that the new ministry was not recommended in the intelligence review that was conducted by Michael L'Estrange and Stephen Merchant.

It seems in some respects that this Department of Home Affairs is a product of the political bickering and infighting that have characterised this government for so long. Even TheDaily Telegraph, which tends to have stories that are very favourable to the government, mucks in, with Sharri Markson writing a tale about the Department of Home Affairs emerging—being born—out of the conflicting relationships in the Prime Minister's cabinet, claiming that the new ministry is a product of the Prime Minister's 'need to be saved from the conservative faction', and I put that in quotation marks. It appears that this department is more a product of the Prime Minister's inability to lead. The Prime Minister can't control members of his own party, and he consistently caves in to a particular faction in his party to appease them, to placate them, and in so doing just hands over all of these unchecked powers, which is not good for Australia.

We on this side urge the government to take a stronger stance and to assure us and the public that the new Department of Home Affairs is based on expert advice and not the political machinations of their factions. Though it only exists to review and amend legislation, the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security provides a very strong form of expert advice, and I would encourage the minister, who's here now, and the government to follow all of the recommendations of the joint parliamentary intelligence committee when constructing and continuing their work to construct the new department.

Peter Dutton (Dickson, Liberal Party, Minister for Immigration and Border Protection) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank all of the members for their contribution to the debate on the Home Affairs and Integrity Agencies Legislation Amendment Bill 2017. As the Prime Minister announced in July 2017, the establishment of the Home Affairs portfolio is part of the most significant reforms to Australia's national intelligence and domestic security arrangements in many decades—in fact, since the Hope royal commissions of the 1970s and 1980s.

The Prime Minister introduced this bill into the House in December 2017 and immediately referred it to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security. The portfolio itself was stood up later in December with the creation of the Department of Home Affairs and the transfer of the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, the Australian Federal Police and AUSTRAC into the portfolio. This new arrangement enhances the government's ability to respond to emerging threats—including terrorism, organised crime and foreign interference—through comprehensive policy development, consolidated and better integrated strategic coordination and the targeted allocation of resources to ensure a safer, more secure Australia. It is a direct response to the evolving and dynamic security environment we face.

This bill implements two key elements of the reforms relating to the Home Affairs portfolio—namely, it facilitates the transfer of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation into the portfolio and enhances the integrity and oversight role of the Attorney-General in relation to our security and intelligence agencies. The bill clarifies the role of the Attorney-General in relation to the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security and the Independent National Security Legislation Monitor, which will transfer to the Attorney-General's portfolio, subject to the agreement of the Governor-General.

I intend to introduce amendments to the bill which will reflect recommendations made by the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security in its two reports tabled on 26 February and 28 March this year. These amendments include measures to implement the three recommendations in the committee's first report as well as introduce further amendments proposed by the government which the committee scrutinised in its second report.

On behalf of the Prime Minister, who referred the bill for inquiry, I again thank the committee for its comprehensive, timely and bipartisan efforts in scrutinising this bill and the further amendments proposed by the government. Together with the amendments that I intend to move shortly, the bill ensures that the ministerial and departmental functions and powers effected by the change in national security arrangements to establish the new Home Affairs portfolio and strengthen the Attorney-General's oversight role are clear on the face of the Commonwealth statute book. This strengthened bill will enhance the government's ability to respond to emerging threats through the integration of national security functions and reinforce the integrity of our national security systems, and I commend the bill to the House.

Ross Vasta (Bonner, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The question is that this bill be now read a second time.

A division having been called and the bells having been rung—

As there are fewer than five members on the side for the noes in this division, I declare the question resolved in the affirmative in accordance with standing order 127. The names of those members who are in the minority will be recorded in the Votes and Proceedings.

Question agreed to, Mr Bandt and Mr Wilkie voting no.

Bill read a second time.