George Brandis (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

The opposition opposes this amendment. It strikes me as more than curious that the Greens would think there should be, in freedom of information laws, equal coverage of the documents of security agencies, which, by their very nature, are necessarily kept secret, and other categories of government documents. Plainly, the documents and information embodied in documents obtained by national security agencies by their very nature must be kept secret. There are very sound national security reasons that everybody understands why that should be so. To treat them as being in a similar category to general government information is a nonsense. For those reasons, the opposition concurs with the government’s opposition to this amendment.