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

I know not to get my hopes up, but you come in here at least in an optimistic frame of mind. I would like to know how the government proposes that these clauses that it has inserted will be interpreted. A very wide range of submitters, from the Pirate Party, Electronic Frontiers Australia, all the way up to the Law Council have said it is vastly open ended to allow a single warrant for a computer system and to then arbitrarily extend it. Does that mean a premise, an entire building, a university campus, a small town? The internet is a network of networks and I believe the Australian law, particularly on surveillance powers, should recognise that fact.

The second issue which, again, has exercised the minds of nearly everyone who made a submission in the brief time that the PJCIS was given to evaluate this bill, concerns the idea that national security reporting becomes criminalised, sharing material on Facebook becomes criminalised, explicitly in black-letter law in this bill and I am appalled that the Attorney-General, who falls over himself in interviews to say he would be the last one to arbitrarily sign off on the coercive powers of the state—I believe he considers himself a true Liberal in the original sense of the word—would allow the criminalisation of reporting of this material.

So we have serious concerns and, again, Senator Fifield, for your benefit, when we come to the committee stage I would be very interested to know how the Australian government can justify clauses that criminalise reporting or authorised disclosure of some of these matters. We have seen from experience overseas, principally in the United States, that national security whistleblowing and the protection of public interest whistleblowing—and I am not talking about espionage—is an essential component of keeping some of these agencies honest.

I want to conclude with some thoughts, again, on community safety as opposed to the government's frame of national security, which always seems to imply increasing militarisation and coercive powers of the state. If we are serious about keeping people safe—about deradicalisation and prevention rather than cleaning up horrific messes after they have occurred—understanding that is partly the mandate of the policing and intelligence agencies is, by definition, pre-emptive. If you are cleaning up after a mess, I understand that is considered a failure and it is not something that anybody wants to see on their watch, whatever their politics.

The other way, apart from raising and increasing coercive surveillance powers, of preventing these attacks in the first place—apart from taking a long, hard look at well over a decade of Australian foreign policy—is to keep our own house in order. Anybody who watched Q&A last night would have seen the presentation by Dr Anne Aly. She spoke briefly of the People Against Violent Extremism organisation she is a part of, and some of the community and family deradicalisation work she has been engaged in. She does this on the proverbial smell of an oily rag; it is not a great proportion of the resources—of the tens and ultimately hundreds of millions of dollars—that are being hurled by this government toward national security objectives, which I understand. What about community safety? What about prevention where it really matters?

These initiatives were discussed at a symposium in Perth in 2013 on countering violent extremism. The Australian government does not have to look very far because some of it was funded by the former government and some of the funding—a trickle—still remains. We have had, at a pilot scale, excellent initiatives built on work done in Germany and other parts of the world, because Australia is obviously not alone in confronting these issues. Just to give you one metric: $13.4 million is dedicated to preventing young Australians from being caught up in these violent networks which operate almost as violent crime networks. That is 0.5 per cent, roughly, of the government's counter-terrorism package.

This has an important place in community safety. Deradicalisation and prevention in the first place—which I understand everybody in here is interested in—need resourcing. I know it is not as dramatic, and it might not get you on the front page of the Daily Telegraph tomorrow, but it is an essential part of preventing the further spread of violence. Cutting $11 million from the Building Multicultural Communities Program is really dumb. Cutting the Independent National Security Legislation Monitor is unforgivable. They are cutting humanitarian foreign aid and our humanitarian refugee intake. They zeroed, earlier this year, our foreign aid contribution to Iraq, which we helped demolish. These are decisions that come back to bite us. These are things that matter. People notice.