Robert Ray (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

As you say, Senator Faulkner, it would have been in place for 13 years without that aspect being reviewed. It is probably the one that has generated the most heat. The ability to detain someone who is not necessarily suspected of a crime for seven days, question them over 24 hours and almost keep them incommunicado is a pretty drastic step in the way we construct our legal system. When you look at the treatment of people suspected of serious criminal offences, you see there are far more protections than there are in this detention regime. If, for some reason, a new Director-General or a new Attorney-General were to really get the bit between their teeth and decide that the detention regime is the way to go, there would be no review or assessment for 10 years.

We do have protections. The Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security has been written into the legislation. That will be helpful, no doubt, in any of these particular processes. But, ultimately, you cannot beat parliamentary scrutiny. For all the foibles and faults of parliamentarians, for all the egotistical trips that they go on and for all the political opportunism that exists, it is still one of the safest and best methods of scrutiny. In an adversarial political system, it promotes transparency and it promotes honesty. To, if you like, delegate that away to an Inspector-General, Attorney-General or somewhere else away from the parliament is not wise. I have to say that nature abhors a vacuum. If you create a vacuum in this area then those very questions that are not asked in open committees and estimates committees will now be asked there, rather than in the more conducive and constructive area of the joint intelligence committee. That will inevitably happen because public scrutiny will be regarded as having been reduced. I think that is a major pity in these particular circumstances.

We are not here alleging abuse and misuse of powers by ASIO. We are not alleging that, but if we do not take into account the potentiality of abuse and we do not put systems in place to scrutinise it and deter it, it may well occur into the future. This sort of legislation has created enormous ripples in our community. You can just start to detect now that people are becoming more comfortable with it, that the scare campaigns around it are starting to slide off and that people have moved their attention to other areas. It is such a pity that we are dealing with such an intractable government on this one issue, when we could see off this legislation. We accept our defeat on the last amendment. We do not agree with it but we accept it. What a pity we have to send this legislation on to the statute books with this massive weakness in it.