Chris Ellison (WA, Liberal Party, Minister for Justice and Customs) Share this | Hansard source

I never said that at all. Senator Stott Despoja should not misrepresent me. I said that it was quite possible that wrong was occasioned to a person without that person knowing about it. You could be defamed in one part of the country and not know about it because you are living in another part. Where you have a legitimate search warrant and you find a letter, which is much like a stored communication, from a third party, and you read that letter and it divulges some relationship between the suspect and a third party and that relationship could cause a great deal of harm to that person’s personal life, there is no requirement by law enforcement officers to communicate with that third party. There is no requirement at all. It is not acted upon; it is knowledge which has been gained during a search warrant. It may be extremely embarrassing to the person concerned, the third party, who is not under investigation but that does not mean that you have to notify every Tom, Dick and Harry that is mentioned or touched on in a search warrant of a house or a property where other third parties, albeit innocent, are mentioned or where there is information. It happens time and time again. It is all a question of what is admissible in the court. There is information that law enforcement comes by all the time during investigations which has no relevance and is discarded. But it does happen because we do not have the ability to say that we are simply not going to go into that house because we might find a letter which might embarrass someone or, if we do go into that house and we find an embarrassing letter we are going to phone them up and say, ‘We just found a very confidential piece of correspondence’—which is the same as an email or a telephone call—‘which is embarrassing to you.’ The search warrant quite rightly allows them to search for documents and to read documents. That happens. It is the same here. To go notifying people of this would destroy the regime. The civil remedies mentioned apply to unlawful interception and we have in place very strict measures for the warrant to be obtained under lawful circumstances, and that is clear in the bill.