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

I am sorry, Senator Stott Despoja, that I have raised your ire in this respect. The point I am making is that this legislation was the subject of a report dating back to November 2003; the direction that the government is taking is not new in that sense. Having read that cross-border investigative report some time ago now, and noting that the bill was introduced back in 2006, in this regard schedule 1 was not unexpected. In providing an update of controlled operations and harmonisation across the states, to ensure that the Commonwealth has the ability to work with the states, we have moved on since the time when the states and the Commonwealth, at least for law enforcement purposes, did not adopt a cooperative approach. But they do now, and they have done so for some time, for a range of very good reasons. By removing this schedule, we would be going back to a position where we might inadvertently hamper, hinder, obstruct or make things difficult. I am sure the government could outline the purposes of ensuring that there is the ability to have, in this instance, effective cross-border investigative powers. That is the point I was making.

Having followed the debate since 2003, it is a quite different point to make that you have complaints about oversight, additional oversight or something which is, in my view, legitimate. It is not for me to judge, but I am referring to matters that you could quite rightly point to and say that they require strengthening. It is quite another matter to say that the Commonwealth should be denied the ability to move towards harmonisation to ensure that the impediments to cross-border investigative operations are removed.

When you juxtapose those positions, you see that the Labor Party entered the debate constructively, as it did during the committee process. I do not like saying this, but the government did respond to the committee recommendations, and it did respond positively, to the extent that it picked up most of the recommendations. I am not always in a position to be able to say that in this place—that the government has picked up most of the recommendations. In fact, in this case it has picked up all bar recommendation 6. There were a range of recommendations dealing with oversight issues and the like. Of course, it only picked up some in part and it changed some others. However, my summation is that it has done better than 50 per cent, and that has been quite a rarity during the last 12 months or so that the government has been in control of the Senate. I do not like to give credit where credit is due when it involves the government, but I will do so in this case, because it has risen to the challenge and provided a response. We have now been able to work through the legislation, and it is better than many other pieces of legislation that we have looked at. I know that is a rather long-winded explanation, but the matter did require one.