Russell Trood (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

One of the many profound consequences of the terrible terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 was the need for governments around the world to assess their capacity to deal with this new and frightening threat of international terrorism. One of the needs, in many cases, was for the introduction of domestic legislation to try and deal with the new challenge that appeared. That meant in Australia, as elsewhere, quite a large amount of legislation which tried to provide a balance between the protection of rights that we treasure and civil liberties that we have taken for granted and the need for public and national security.

There is always a risk when governments act in a new area like this—particularly when they introduce quite wide-ranging legislation—that well-established civil rights, ones that citizens have enjoyed for a long period of time and take for granted, might be compromised. So governments have to strike a balance. They have to strike a balance between individuals’ rights—at least in a democracy they do—and the provision of national security, which is increasingly demanding. It is not an easy balance to strike. Terrorism is a profound challenge to this society and many others. It ought not to be underestimated. It requires governments to take measures which might not in the past have been acceptable to either the government or its citizens. But the Australian public, like other publics, are entitled to expect that a government will do all it can to provide for their personal security and the national security. That is what I think that much of the legislation which has been introduced in Australia does. It seeks to provide that level of security, that level of confidence, that we can meet the kinds of challenges with which we might be confronted. There is plenty of evidence in relation to the success we have had in meeting many of these challenges. That said, it seems to me that governments need to be cautious about the way they act in this area. They need to be careful about stripping away civil rights that are part of the fabric of our democracy and are the foundation of our freedom.

It is in that context that I particularly welcome this piece of legislation, the National Security Legislation Monitor Bill 2009 [2010], because it seems to me that this is a piece of legislation which has as its central purpose the creation of a safeguard, an independent reviewer, to ensure that Australia’s counterterrorism legislation is effective but also contains appropriate safeguards to protect the rights of individuals in this society. This is not a new idea. It is an idea which has been in practice in the United Kingdom for quite a number of years. The independent reviewer of terrorism laws is an office that has been in place in the United Kingdom for quite some period of time. By all accounts, it has been a successful innovation in the protection of interests. The work of the office is widely acclaimed. So we have a precedent which is being applied in this legislation. However, there are some important differences between this legislation and the United Kingdom legislation. Regrettably, some of those differences, in my view, make the office that is proposed under this legislation likely to be rather less effective than the office in the United Kingdom.

I want to look at some of the shortcomings of the bill, as I see them, in the short time that is available to me. Before I do, I wish to acknowledge the considerable debt that I think all Australians have, in relation to the protection of their civil liberties, to Mr Petro Georgiou, the honourable member for Kooyong in the other place. Mr Georgiou has a long and distinguished record of supporting human rights in Australia. It was Mr Georgiou, not the supposedly human rights oriented Rudd government, who first proposed that there be an independent reviewer.