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

Thank you, Mr Acting Deputy President, I appreciate that. A large number of the amendments that we will propose further down the track in this debate go to the reporting obligations of the officer so that the public knows what the monitor is doing and also knows that he or she has been free from executive interference. We have enough agencies on massive budgets working behind closed doors on the issue of counterterrorism and national security. What we do not have yet is an officer with relative freedom to report as he or she sees fit on the operation of these laws.

In the broader context of how counterterrorism work and the process of law reform are going on in Australia, we are still waiting for a counterterrorism white paper. We have seen substantial proposals for law reform come from the Attorneys-General’s national security legislation discussion paper but there is an absence of a white paper that gives us the strategic direction and some insight into where the government is actually heading on counterterrorism law reform in Australia. We do not have the white paper, but we have been asked to accept a hefty national security legislation discussion paper which, in a way, was quite sketchy—it dealt with some issues and left some others completely unsaid. We believe, in essence, that the monitor should have occurred first. That is something this parliament could have dealt with at the end of 2008 with the private senator’s bill that Senator Brandis spoke of before. Then we should have seen a white paper, so that we would actually know where the government is heading, and then the proposals for law reform that can be properly informed in public debate. Instead, it is happening completely backwards, in the reverse of that order.

I will speak in much greater length during the committee stage about the Greens amendments, but I would firstly acknowledge, as Senator Brandis did, that the government has moved on this. It has accepted some of the recommendations of the committee, and that is always welcome. I have been involved already, in my brief time here, in enough committee work to know that really valuable cross-party work is done and it is always appreciated when the government has the courage to admit that it did not have all the right ideas and was not right 100 per cent of the time. There has been some movement, as I said, particularly in the area of human rights and the way that this agency or office will review human rights obligations. But there is still some work to do, and I intend to work with both the major parties and the cross-benches to make sure we get the very best out of this office that we can.

Because terrorism involves such horrific crimes, as a representative of a party of which one of the pillars is nonviolence, I have a very strong belief that we should do everything that we can to protect Australians and people overseas from crimes of terror. That should not be at the expense of providing for the human rights obligations that we are signatory to and the rights that we hold so dear. Counterterrorism laws are effectively designed to protect, in essence, our way of life, so we have been very concerned for a long period of time that those rights have been eroded by the operation of these laws that still rest, even today, on the statute books. We do not believe that there necessarily has to be that trade-off with the operation of really draconian and restrictive counterterrorism laws. We believe that some of these should simply be repealed without even the dignity of a review by the National Security Monitor. But most of all I look forward to improving this bill as it goes on its way through the chamber, so that we can get the office up and running with some proper resourcing and some really transparent reporting obligations.