David Feeney (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Defence) Share this | Hansard source

The first issue is at what point a researcher seeks to make such a disclosure. I draw you back to the example I tried to use earlier in this debate when talking about the mass spectrometer. Where information is of a highly technical nature—in that example, if a researcher was indicating how the blueprints of that piece of equipment might be used to produce weapons of mass destruction—then obviously that is something we seek to have control over. If the research is going to the more mundane aspects of how that piece of equipment works and the technical arrangements around it then we would not.