Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The point made by Senator Stott Despoja is one that was in my mind as I wrote this amendment in the forced atmosphere of this legislation being dumped on the parliament with unnecessary haste and speed, and without the due diligence that we should be bringing to it. But that is part of government control of the Senate. The executive and Prime Minister John Howard say, ‘Put that legislation through,’ and it goes through. We sat late last night for no good reason whatsoever.

The Senate is now being abused almost on a daily basis by Prime Minister Howard’s executive. We even found yesterday afternoon that, with a major environmental matter being discussed before the Senate, the minister for the environment was not here, because there was a cabinet meeting on—a cabinet meeting while both houses of parliament are sitting. There were no ministers, presumably, in either house because the Prime Minister says: ‘Parliament does not matter any more. It is what I, my executive and my ministers do that runs this country. The elected parliament of the people does not matter. It is out.’

We are well on our way to a dictatorship of the executive. In fact, we are at a dictatorship of the executive. We are not on the way, we are there. The parliament is being treated with utter contempt by the Rt Hon. the Prime Minister John Howard as he deals with the decision-making process in his rooms. He just says to his ministers and minions: ‘Get on with it. Change the sittings of the Senate. Reduce them to the minimum’—and we are reduced to the minimum—‘but extend the length of the sitting’—so we sat last night rather than having another week’s sitting—‘and then guillotine any debate that gets long so that we can get out of here and not have the government under scrutiny.’

They are the circumstances under which the real opposition, which is here on the crossbench, is working. Labor are supporting this extraordinary piece of legislation, which erodes so many civil liberties in Australia. The real opposition here on the crossbenches is left rapidly trying to write amendments which would bring sanity into the imprudent, to say the least, legislation that we are dealing with.

I put that amendment there, Senator Stott Despoja, through you Madam Temporary Chair, simply to point out that this is not just about terrorism or murder. This is about a whole range of issues on which government snoops can now phone tap innocent people’s lines, record the greatest intimacies between innocent Australian citizens and in the process come up with charges on crimes or potential crimes that are of a minor nature and which were never ostensibly in the view of the people voting for them. The government and the opposition will vote for this. It can be used, for example, to examine people’s taxation records. Totally unbeknownst to the citizen, a conversation between an innocent person and somebody who is a suspect being investigated by the tax department can be recorded and investigated by the snoops in the backroom. That can be kept on record or further charges can come out of it. I seek leave to remove subclause (2)(a) from my amendment.

Leave granted.

The point is that we now revert to the catch all, where there is an enormous amount unlisted. There is nothing from the government or the opposition supporting this legislation to say where the line is drawn. What is the guidance? In this unprecedented legislation, which cuts right across time honoured freedoms in our great Australian democracy, what crimes are we seeking to arraign private citizens for that allow snooping on their phone lines and intimate conversations?

I quoted from an essay last night which involved the very incisive legal mind of Mr George Williams. I want to quote from his Saturday essay, which was in the Age last weekend—just a part of it; we should incorporate the whole into Hansard—and I recommend it to senators. He says:

Unfortunately, new laws have been made with such haste—

he is talking about this sort of law—

that a careful assessment of where we already stand has been impossible. The laws passed after the London bombings were enacted so quickly that they have come into force before two continuing inquiries into the effectiveness of our existing laws can report. Before the 2005 attack, neither the Government nor its key agencies were putting the case for change to the law or an expansion of their powers, yet after the bombings the pressure for this proved irresistible.

The cycle of an attack followed by a new law is dangerous. Driven by fear and the need to act, we run the risk of a series of overreactions. This is the dynamic that terrorists rely upon. By our own actions, we may isolate and ostracise members of our community, who instead of helping intelligence-gathering may be susceptible targets for terrorist recruitment. Through our over-reactions and short-term thinking, we may actually make ourselves more vulnerable to terrorist attack.

Later in that essay, Mr Williams said:

It is natural that our fears will lead us to do all that we can to protect ourselves and our families, especially in response to a faceless and unknown threat such as terrorism. With a recent poll finding that more than two-thirds of Australians believe the terrorists will strike ‘before too long’ and that a terrorist attack in this country is inevitable, it is not surprising that there is great pressure to enact new laws at any cost.

What we need is leaders who, rather than playing to our fears, help us to understand that we must accept a level of risk of terrorist attack. There is no other option. If we strive for the illusory goal of full protection from terrorism, we risk doing even greater damage to our society and its freedoms and values. This will also warp political debate, policy choices and resource allocation in ways that cannot be justified—

witness this truncated and ill-informed debate today in the Senate. Mr Williams says:

We risk repeating these same mistakes if we do not change course. Unfortunately, there is no current sign that this will occur. New attacks will lead to new laws that will further erode our fundamental freedoms, increase fear and anger in parts of the community and make the problem more intractable.

It seems likely that in the past 4½ years we have seen only the beginning of the ‘war on terror’. The laws we have today were unthinkable before September 11. It is equally hard to imagine the laws that we will end up with in the event of future attacks.

Today we have laws coming through that are not a result of an attack, but they will result in a widespread attack on liberties and privacy, which are fundamental to a healthy democracy and which Australians have taken for granted. They can no longer take it for granted. This legislation allows a whole array of government snoops to move into the privacy of communications between innocent Australians, on innocent Australians. We will see the government turn down every amendment to put a check on that.

We have the Howard government, this Liberal government, which should stand for individual liberties—and what is more important there than the right to privacy?—attacking them, eroding and corroding them and giving powers to faceless people. There are not dozens of them but hundreds of them, in an increasing array of bureaucracies way beyond just ASIO and the Australian Federal Police, who will be able to at the behest of an Attorney-General, including Mr Ruddock, the current Attorney, gain information from the calls of innocent Australians who felt they were free from this sort of move towards police-state surveillance.

We, unusually amongst the community of older democracies, have no bill of rights. We have got no guarantee in our constitution at all, unlike the Americans, the British or the Germans. We are vulnerable, and this Howard executive, which has sidelined parliament, is going for broke. The minister might like to say what the government thinks about a bill of rights and responsibilities in this country and what its argument for refusing to entertain such an idea is. It is such a dangerous time for democracy—and I do not mean danger at the behest of terrorists; I mean danger at the behest of an authoritarian executive as we have now in the Howard government. We have the Greens and Democrats defending long-held liberal ideals, long-held rights of Australians to know that their privacy is not being invaded by governments with people in backrooms with recordings of their intimate conversations without them knowing about it, without them ever knowing about it and without accountability for that.

On the matter of safeguards, if you look at yesterday’s report to the parliament about the requirement for warrants in such matters and the approach from the Australian Federal Police and others to those who issue warrants you will find that out of some 250 requests not one was turned down. Who knows about that? Who knows the argument when an approach for a warrant in secret—of course, it has to be—is made? There is no counterargument. There is no defence in that system.

Here we are expanding that capability enormously. It is very dangerous legislation because it is not limited, because it throws the net so wide and because no Australian, no matter how innocent they might be, is outside the reach of this snoop legislation. My motion on behalf of the Greens tests the water on it. It simply says: let us see if we cannot have doctor-patient relationships and lawyer-client relationships protected from this snooping. Let us see what the government has to say about the vulnerability of members of parliament and High Court and Federal Court judges to having their phones tapped under this legislation. Let the minister explain to the Senate under what circumstances their phones might be tapped in this new era, when nobody at all is invulnerable to the creeping invasion of privacy which is inherent in this legislation.