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

I rise to speak on this bill, the Defence Trade Controls Amendment Bill 2015—I listened to Senator Carr's contribution with interest, because there is an element of deja vu in debating this bill.

Firstly, I should say at the outset that the Greens support passage of this bill for reasons that would be fairly obvious to anybody who read or heard the things we said in October 2012 during the original debate of this bill. Senator Fierravanti-Wells, who is representing the government this morning, would be well aware. You were sitting on the opposition benches at that time, and Senator Carr was in government. Effectively, what we are doing today is cleaning up the messes that were well and truly understood on the day the bill was passed back in 2012 and all of the things that Senator Johnston, who was the shadow defence spokesperson at the time, mentioned in an entirely articulate critique of the bill at the time. And yet the opposition voted for the bill. Now we come back today. Here we are in March 2015, 2½ years later, to fix the mess that everybody understood we were making at the time.

There is obviously cross-party support for this important bill, so I do not propose to tie the chamber up for long. The idea that this chamber would have passed legislation with its eyes wide open that could criminalise and see researchers being thrown in jail for doing entirely legitimate work just because somebody in the defence community thought that eventually somebody could turn that into a weapon is absolutely absurd, and the safeguards that we are building back in today to prevent that from happening were entirely understood by, I think, all sides of this parliament back in 2012.

Before the bill passes I do want to take a couple of minutes to reflect on how we got here in the first place. The initial Defence Trade Controls Bill 2011 was really introduced for one purpose, and that was to give effect to the Australia United States Defence Trade Cooperation Treaty, which was signed by the Bush administration and the Howard government way back in 2007. That treaty was viewed with relief by some Australian defence industries and weapons manufacturers because it allowed them to evade a fairly restrictive export control scheme which they had previously critiqued pretty heavily. It was viewed with some suspicion by the Greens and other groups who are focused on peace and non-proliferation of weapons because it openly facilitated the weapons trade and it should never be made easier for armaments to be traded for the simple fact that there are always unintended consequences. We are seeing some of the aftereffects of that play out in Iraq at the moment.

So the concern that was expressed by many was the impact that the bill would have on Australia's research community, who were looking on somewhat aghast at the time as they were told by legislators that they faced the prospect of being thrown in jail simply for conducting research and publishing results on what had previously not been seen as hugely controversial subjects. One example which is particularly close to my heart is that of encryption. The United States government defence community and the technical community went through this hugely divisive debate in the US in the 1990s in the so-called Crypto Wars, when the United States government decided to classify strong cryptography—that is, encryption of privacy for communications between, for example, financial institutions, diplomats or anybody who has the need for strongly protected communications—as a weapon for the purposes of exports. So weak and degraded crypto protocols were exported to other countries around the world, which has later come back to bite the United States government because they end up as security vulnerabilities placed there deliberately in order to be able to be broken and accessed that then effectively compromised, for example, the global financial system, the banking system and the diplomatic community. It was exactly these kinds of things.

When the defence community sees things that could potentially be used as weapons—and that is just one example—and therefore classifies them as defence exports, you can inadvertently introduce vulnerabilities, weaknesses or cripple research. You would have to say that is an unintended consequence. That is not something we want to see a repeat of.

As I said, these issues were very well understood when they were examined by the foreign affairs, defence and trade committee back in 2012. That committee inquiry resulted in probably two of the strongest worded reports that I have ever seen published by that committee. In short, the committee sent the bill back to Defence and asked it to fix the errors that had been introduced and to actually talk to the Australian research community before the bill would be debated in parliament. What became really apparent at the time—this is something Senator Carr managed to avoid mentioning in his speech—was that the timing of the debate of the bill in the Senate was basically designed to make sure the government of the day had some kind of announceable to put up, because the then US secretaries of state and defence were scheduled to arrive in Australia for fairly high level talks. This point is acknowledged by Senator Johnston in his contribution at the time. What the hell was the rush? As it turned out, it was a photo opportunity: we were passing legislation the parliament knew to be flawed so that a press opportunity could be taken advantage of. So two and a half years later here we are, fixing the problems which were absolutely well understood at the time, and everything is again happening at the last minute. We are told if the bill does not pass during this sitting period, researchers will face very real consequences. I happen to believe that is not an idle threat. We do need to pass legislation quickly, but we also need to make sure we get it right.

An exposure draft of the current bill was only released a week or so before Christmas and I believe the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Legislation Committee only signed off its final report into this bill about 40 minutes ago. Again, you would not say that was legislative best practice. Under the previous government we saw an abuse of parliamentary process which put researchers at significant risk, but I am pleased to say there are amendments, and I want to pay credit to the current government for recognising that the system could not stay as it was; that it was completely unconscionable. It is a shame that it has taken two and a half years to fix, but I give acknowledgement where it is due to the Labor Party and the government. They have brought forward amendments; they do not go 100 per cent of the way to assuaging the concerns that were raised at the time but nonetheless the most serious problems that were introduced into the bill—with eyes open, by a parliament that knew exactly what it was doing at the time—will finally be fixed when this bill passes into law. I am happy to commend the bill to the chamber.