Joe Ludwig (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Manager of Opposition Business in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

I recollect it. The Attorney-General has picked up one substantive recommendation out of the committee report: the spam one. You might say that there are a few more, but that was the substantive one. It was a matter that, I think, the Attorney-General’s Department was embarrassed about at the one-day hearing that the committee had, because, of course, they should have picked it up. They did not really need the telecommunications authority to come along and say, ‘Hey, I’m in trouble if you do this.’ The Attorney-General’s Department looked embarrassed on the day, and they should have been embarrassed. That was the Attorney-General picking up the recommendation. I do not think he had a choice, quite frankly.

It was an error that needed to be corrected, and it was embarrassing that we had to get to a point where that authority had to make a submission to the committee to get the error corrected. One would have thought that a phone call to the Attorney-General’s Department saying, ‘Look, there’s a problem and we need it fixed,’ would have rectified it rather than having to go to the committee and then embarrassing the Attorney-General. I enjoyed it, I have to say; I do not suppose that they did very much. I could go into a couple of spam jokes, but I will not. I will save us all from that. It is an area in which we now have a position where Labor, the committee and the majority committee members, including Liberal backbenchers, have recommended that strong privacy protections, and the safeguards necessary to ensure that those privacy concerns are addressed, are included in this bill, and the government is dismissive of that position. That is where we have now got to.

Question negatived.

I move:

(6)    Schedule 1, item 9, page 15 (after line 17), at the end of section 118, add:

        (4)    Without limiting subsection (2), the warrant may specify that:

             (a)    stored communications which were transmitted prior to a specified date may not be accessed; and

             (b)    only stored communications sent to or by certain named persons may be accessed.

Here is a good opportunity. I move this amendment with some hope, I guess. The matters under consideration are issues about stored communication warrants. It is really a technical amendment that summarises, as I have said, Labor’s belt and braces approach to strengthening privacy protection. The purpose of this amendment is best summarised if you look at paragraph 3.71 of the committee report. It is a very short paragraph. If the government were serious about ensuring that there was an improvement to the legislation and if they had adequately looked at all the committee recommendations and the issues in some detail, one wonders why they would not pick it up.

This is what the committee report said:

... individual privacy protection ought to be the chief consideration in any regime permitting access to personal communications. This is particularly important where communications may include information subject to legal professional privilege. The Committee considers that additional considerations for issuing authorities such as those suggested above will only serve to enhance the privacy protection already outlined in the Bill.

Minister, this provides for a matter that was raised. The committee did not look at it in any long detail because it thought it was a pretty short point that you should pick up, quite frankly. The minister talked about consistency. How about some consistency with the Blunn review? That would help too. We would certainly achieve a much better outcome if you adopted consistency not only across your legislative framework but also out of the Blunn review. This is a matter that you could easily deal with. I call on the government to agree that they do want consistency with Blunn.