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

At this point I will just commend amendment (1) to the chamber and then move on.

Question negatived.

I can sense a pattern developing. By leave—I move Australian Greens amendments (2) to (4) on sheet 6182 together:

(2)    Clause 7, page 6 (after line 29), after paragraph (1)(f), insert:

            (fa)    to review and report on the exercise of powers under section 3UEA of the Crimes Act 1914, including a review of the report presented to Parliament under section 3UEB of that Act;

(3)    Clause 8, page 8 (lines 24 and 25), omit subclause (5), substitute:

        (5)    In making a determination under subsection (4), the Minister responsible for the ACC must include in it his or her reasons for making the determination.

     (5A)    In giving reasons under subsection (5), the Minister responsible for the ACC is not required to provide information that would disclose the content of the sensitive information.

(4)    Clause 9, page 9 (lines 26 and 27), omit subclause (5), substitute:

        (5)    In making a determination under subsection (4), the Minister responsible for the AFP must include in it his or her reasons for making the determination.

     (5A)    In giving reasons under subsection (5), the Minister responsible for the AFP is not required to provide information that would disclose the content of the sensitive information.

This is my final batch of amendments for this bill.

The substance that I want to speak of is simply caught in the proposed amendments No. 3 and No. 4 relating to the minister providing reasons for the failure to release information. This was canvassed in some depth by the committee’s work. If the AFP Commissioner or the CEO of the ACC decides not to refer information to the committee, the committee may then request the minister to make a decision as to whether the information should in fact be referred.

The minister, however, is not required to provide reasons if he or she agrees that the information should not be released to the committee, and that is what these amendments go to. The operation of the committee would be improved if we required the relevant minister to provide reasons for a failure to release information to the proposed committee. I have done enough committee work to understand just how frustrating it can be when you ask the minister to oversight and take a view, and what comes back from the minister’s office is simply a failure to accommodate or a letter that says ‘no’. I think the committee would find that it would be very helpful to have some kind of statement of reasons provided. We are not asking the minister to provide a specific explanation or to disclose material that is sensitive or against the public interest but merely to outline why the material should not be released without risking the confidentiality of the material itself.

These bills address quite serious issues of national security and human rights, and it was reflected in the government’s decision last August to release a public exposure draft of the bill. The government has revealed disregard for the detailed nuanced and thoughtful contributions that experts brought to the review process for these bills both at the public exposure stage and at the Senate inquiry stage. That is why I have taken a certain amount of the time of the chamber this afternoon and this evening to give a voice to the huge variety of people who provided input to these bills and who were then summarily disregarded by both the government and the opposition. Perhaps the government feels that it is its job to ignore anything that it does not feel is along the lines of what it has already proposed, but I think we have been let down quite comprehensively by the opposition tonight, which failed to advance even a single amendment.

It is not simply their absence of support for Greens amendments. Obviously they are fully entitled to oppose anything that we bring forward in here, but to just assume that the government got it completely right on all counts on legislation as complex and far reaching as this after the amount of work that has been done and the very strong contest of views that was brought to the committee’s work I think is extraordinary—that the opposition would then just sit back and knock our amendments off one after the other without proposing any ideas at all. We have to assume that somehow they think the government got it exactly right, and I find that very difficult to believe.

Before I leave these final three amendments, because these will be the last comments I make on this bill, I just want to briefly look at what we have not discussed tonight, what has not been debated and what was entirely left out of the ambit of this legislation. This is all material that is waiting for our overworked part-time Independent National Security Legislation Monitor, which does not yet exist. The bills barely scratch the surface we have been discussing tonight with respect to Australia’s antiterrorism laws—the subject of the Senate inquiry that elicited overwhelming support for a thorough and meaningful change in our antiterrorism legislation. The concerns that remain that we have barely touched on tonight are the definition of a terrorist act contained in section 101.1 of the Criminal Code, the offence of providing support to a terrorist organisation in section 102.7 of the Commonwealth Criminal Code, the offence of providing training to or receiving training from a terrorist organisation in section 102.5 of the Criminal Code, balancing the risk to national security against the rights of the defendant in section 31(8) of the National Security Information (Criminal and Civil Proceedings) Act that I spoke of at some length earlier and the requirement for lawyers to have security clearances in terrorism cases under the NSI Act, as I spoke of before, preventative detention orders which are proposed to be reviewed eventually by COAG—if the minister wants to update us as to the progress of that review that would be appreciated—and control orders to be reviewed by COAG. There was not a word about ASIO, who managed to escape this process entirely unscathed, unamended and unconsidered as far as we can tell.

I commend amendments (2) to (4) to the chamber. If the minister is able to provide us with any comfort or any update at all as to those other matters, particularly the ones before COAG, that would be greatly appreciated but I will end tonight as I began. This is a colossal missed opportunity not just from the government but from the apparent extraordinary silence of the opposition which simply disappeared from view towards the end of a process in which they had participated fully and I thought actually quite meaningfully. They disappeared when it came to the crunch and this is where we come to tonight. I commend these amendments to the Senate.