Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Thanks, Mr Acting Deputy President; I appreciate that. When this debate was interrupted earlier, I was discussing the fact that the Greens certainly support the model that has been put forward. In fact, it is the model for a national terrorism legislation reviewer that we have been proposing for quite some time—and it is now five years overdue, so we are glad to at least see the National Security Legislation Monitor Bill 2009 [2010] turn up. But I am perplexed as to why the government thinks that a part-time reviewer working with two staff out of the Prime Minister’s office, with really sketchy reporting obligations and not much of a budget to speak of, is going to be sufficient to undertake the vast amount of work that is going to be required of this office.

The reviewer is going to have to conduct a very broad ranging analysis of an array of complex and sensitive terrorism laws, and perhaps review them every time they are used, when the Prime Minister requests it or when the reviewer chooses to on his or her own motion. The staffing arrangement, two staffers to support one part-time officer, is essentially going to cripple the office at the outset. I think that is the real risk here. It certainly speaks volumes about the government’s actual priorities for this office. They will be able to say: ‘Tick. That was an election commitment—there is something that obviously should have been instituted in the first place—but, by the way, we’re not going to resource it, so good luck to that office!’ As the demands on the monitor increase, obviously so too should the resources, and that is something we will be tracking very closely as the work of this office unfolds.

Independence was an issue that was raised by coalition senators and by us during the committee inquiries as we investigated various iterations of this bill. The government has at least seen the sense in highlighting the independence of the office: the word ‘independent’ is now in the title of the office. So that is something, because the independence of the office is vital if the exercise is to actually increase public confidence and balance terrorism laws. That is why we argued that the title should at least acknowledge that. We would have preferred the title ‘independent reviewer of terrorism laws’, but the government has not gone along with that.

The independence of the office needs to be not just in a name but also in the way that it operates. We believe there is merit in the office existing outside the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. We expressed concern at the evidence provided by PM&C in the Senate inquiry that they already had specific staff in mind for the monitor’s office. So there is a process of hand-picking going on. No disrespect is intended to either the reviewer or the staff that the officers may have had in mind at the time, but we would prefer to see a process where the office can function with genuine independence in mind. We do not have any confidence at the moment in the quality or the quantity of independence of the office simply because of its placement within PM&C and the fact that is where the staff will be drawn from. We would rather have seen a much more broad-ranging process to recruit suitably qualified staff for this important office.

I am also very pleased that the government has recognised the need for Australia’s human rights obligations to be part of the reviewer’s mandate. For me, this is the biggest move we have seen so far on the part of the government, and I am very happy to acknowledge that at least it will now be an intrinsic part of the reviewer’s work to benchmark terror laws against Australia’s human rights obligations. We still have a couple of amendments to tighten up the wording and to make sure that it is absolutely implicit because, really, that is one of the primary functions of the office, in my view.

This exercise is about human rights and about achieving a better balance within the anti-terror laws between security and protection of civil and political rights, which in fact these laws really should be intended to protect. The Australian Greens have consistently sought to link the efforts of the review mechanism to Australia’s human rights obligations under the various treaties and conventions we have signed over a long period of time. One of the things that we will attempt to amend, and that I hope we see opposition and government support for, is that the Human Rights Commissioner should be able to make references to the monitor in addition to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security. We recognise the value of having a parliamentary joint committee being able to refer matters to the terror laws reviewer or monitor, and the Human Rights Commissioner should be able to do exactly the same.

One of the key issues that has been left undone and, as far as I am concerned, one where we will be able to make the most improvements to the bill as it sits before us will be around the reporting obligations of the monitor. One of the worst things we could be left with is an office, with barely enough resources to do the job, that reports to the Prime Minister and then some time down the track, at the Prime Minister’s discretion, sanitised reports may or may not make their way into the public domain. We know at the outset that this could be done in a much better way.

The Prime Minister can currently determine the order in which the reviewer attends to the workload, and that again goes to the independence of the office. The officer needs to be able to set his or her own priorities and not necessarily be hijacked by the political imperatives that come from the Prime Minister’s office. Even with the best intentions in the world, unless it is a much larger office, we think the monitor needs to be able to set his or her own priorities.

The only reporting obligation that the monitor will have—and the minister, during committee stage, may correct me on this—will be a heavily edited annual report. That may well be all that we see: an annual report that will come after being sanitised by the executive, by the government—and that surely is not the intention. That is not what was designed here and it is not what the public needs from this office. We believe that the monitor should be required to table a report and the government be required to provide the response within a period of 12 months. If the monitor has undertaken a particular piece of work, that should then be reported to parliament with national security sensitive matters removed by the monitor himself.