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

I have a couple of questions before I discuss and then move the set of amendments I have proposed. The issue that I had put to the minister before we got up for dinner was the purpose of the bill—what it is actually for—because nobody has really been able to satisfactorily identify what you need ASIO to be able to do that it cannot already do. In the pursuit of its quite legitimate surveillance and intelligence-gathering activities on organisations engaged in politically motivated violence, terrorism and so on, I do not think there is anything controversial about ASIO going ahead and doing that. What becomes controversial is when we quadruple its budget and staffing allocation, build it a fortress down on the lake and then completely open the floodgates to the kind of investigative work that it can undertake.

This is not about new powers for ASIO. That was something that the minister said before we rose for dinner to try to ease my mind that ASIO was not getting any new powers here. That is not the point. What they are being given is the ability to exercise the powers that they currently have across a vastly broader range of groups, individuals and now, I think quite clearly, civil society organisations.

I will put to you a brief quotation from the submission of the Law Council of Australia to the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee on 5 May. They told us that the threshold tests—the boundaries around which ASIO is permitted or not permitted, either on their own motion or, later, if ASIO is being investigated by the IGIS as to whether they were inside or outside their mandate—are important. Mr Grant, the Secretary-General of the Law Council of Australia, said:

These threshold tests are important. If they are framed too broadly they provide no safeguard against the misuse or overuse of ASIO's powers. Further, the effectiveness of the oversight function of the Inspector General of Intelligence and Security is seriously undermined because, ultimately, the ASIO Act provides the framework against which that Office assess the lawfulness and appropriateness of ASIO's activities.

My question to you, Minister, is how, even if you accept that the government does need to expand ASIO's mandate—and I do not for a moment—you answer the quite legitimate point raised by the Law Council. You have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. You have gone so far that there will henceforth be no benchmarks against which to assess whether ASIO is acting legitimately or not, because you have so broadened the range of targets that it may now surveil.