Mark Bishop (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I too wish to take note of the report from the Parliamentary Joint Committee on the Australian Crime Commission. I make the point at the outset that it has indeed been a wide-ranging and useful inquiry. It gives particular insight into the nature of the problem of organised crime. The recommendations are relevant and, if implemented, would improve the capacity of law enforcement agencies. To that extent I support the recommendations.

As the report notes, however, there is a gap between evidence on the nature of organised crime and the committee’s knowledge about what is happening to combat it, except in the most general terms. It is inevitably a feature of the subject matter, where compromise is necessary in the interests of confidentiality. I can understand why law enforcement agencies are reluctant to speak openly. That tends to limit the normal modus operandi of a parliamentary committee such as this. Thus, as Senator Ian Macdonald noted, my additional comments in this report may appear critical of the committee.

The inquiry had broad terms of reference, so we might not have done complete justice to the subject matter. I also suggest—and I stand by my remarks—that the committee may have misunderstood its own terms of reference in embarking on the inquiry in the first place. The committee’s terms of reference limit its role to matters ‘appertaining to the authority’—that is, the Australian Crime Commission. By my reading, each of the five terms of reference confines, and continues to confine, the committee’s activities to the functions, duties, powers, structure and procedures of the ACC.

In its report on organised crime, the committee has dealt with broad-ranging matters relating to organised crime—not the ACC’s part in combating organised crime. There are sections, of course, and the integration of, and access to, databases is one important matter where the ACC is making steady progress. Nor do my comments derogate from the value of anything the committee has heard or said. The report is a relatively useful assessment of organised crime in Australia. But the report itself makes little comment on the ACC’s role or the state of play nationally under its responsibility for dealing with this. It is an important point to be considered when the committee discusses what it might next investigate.

Putting aside the technical issue about the committee’s role and function—and, indeed, it is more than a technical issue, because it goes to the heart of the delegation of authority from the parliament to the committee and the creation of a set of functions for the committee—I would like to also address a contradiction which occurred to me during the inquiry. That is, that there is an ambivalent policy attitude towards organised crime on the one hand and terrorism on the other. When the committee looked at issues such as money laundering, identification authentication, internet access and communication interception, it found that a strict regime has been put in place for one but not for the other.

Indeed, certainly at the Commonwealth level, the resources allocated to antiterrorist activity far outweigh those for combating organised crime. The legal regime against terrorism is much tougher, yet these new powers to fight terrorism are not as yet translatable to organised crime, even though their purpose, protecting the public, is the same. Controversy surrounding identification authenticity for mobile phones and SIM cards is a case in point. State law enforcement agencies identified this shortcoming in the current law as a major gap in their capability. Whilst the Attorney-General has been reluctant to proceed with tougher identity checks for obtaining SIM cards, the Haneef case may have indeed caused a rethink. Acceptance of the committee’s recommendation should address that.

No such double standard exists in respect of the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Amendment Bill 2007 currently before the parliament. Whilst the committee did not consider the importance of this bill, the bill goes some way towards addressing another law enforcement agency need to access telephone and internet communication detail—that is, time of calls, duration, numbers calling and called, location of calls and internet sites visited but not, I stress, content. In this instance at least, the synergy of interest between policing terrorists and criminals is treated alike. My point is simply this: why is this approach not adopted more broadly? With those comments, I commend the report to the Senate. I also put on record my appreciation for the work done by the committee secretary, Dr Dewar, and the principal research officer, Ms Anne O’Connell.

I return at the end of my comments to matters raised by the chair of the committee, Senator Ian Macdonald. The point that goes to the nature of the evidence that was received—seeing that Senator Macdonald specifically raised it—is this: nothing new or that was not completely on the open and public record was presented to the committee. Everything that was presented was available in annual reports or in parliamentary reports.