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

That is a bit of a shame. I have no other questions. I am not at all satisfied and we will call a division on this one, Chair, when you put the question, because it is one of the more egregious amendments and one that I think would have been really valuable for the committee to examine. My understanding is that this issue was quite a major topic of the roundtables and one that was unresolved. The minister even acknowledges that it was not resolved to the satisfaction of at least one party, and I am glad to hear the minister acknowledge that.

Creating a whole new offence for the publication or other dissemination of DSGL technology by the public or sectors of the public by other means was not proposed in the original bill. It was not proposed that either publication or the wider concept of dissemination would be potentially criminalised. I think the practicalities of what this clause would mean for research should have been better contemplated. This is the sort of thing that we could have used a day or a half-day committee hearing to bounce off expert witnesses and they could have told us exactly how this is going to play out in the real world.

Because it is about the possible publication of information about controlled material at some point in the future, it effectively means that the defence minister, even if it is not his intention, can censor research itself. On some of the advice that we have, because researchers will need to consider making applications at the commencement of the research process not necessarily at the point when they are ready to hit to print but much further upstream, it is not clear from the supplementary EM what the words 'publish or otherwise disseminate' mean. But it would appear to be a very broad offence provision. Other legislation defines 'publication' very broadly to mean publishing in newspapers or via TV, radio, internet, articles and so on. Whereas I think we are assuming the rather more narrow interpretation of publishing as in it going into a peer reviewed journal. As the term 'publication' is used in other statutes, it is very much more broad than that.

The Greens will therefore oppose this amendment, partly because it has not been examined. We were not given the courtesy of examining this amendment during the committee process. We will also oppose it because it introduces a chilling effect, quite a dangerous one, attaching a 10-year criminal offence to the publication of scientific research, unless you are willing to tug the sleeve of the defence minister who quite frankly probably has better things to do. I think this is a very dangerous amendment to introduce at such a late stage into this bill. Whatever the opposite of commending is, that is what we are doing to this amendment to the chamber.