George Brandis (Queensland, Liberal Party, Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

I think you have to take a practical view of this. The resources of agencies, and police agencies in particular, are concentrated naturally on the most serious crime. The particular motive or reason or purpose of the government and the opposition—which at the time of the first PJCIS inquiry were, of course, themselves the government—in bringing this forward was to deal with terrorism. I make no apology for saying that. It is also true that access to metadata is not just useful for investigating terrorist networks. It is useful for investigating other, particularly networked, criminal groups: paedophilia, notoriously, which we know from investigations operates through networks and often over the internet; organised crime. Common or garden crime is less likely to involve reliance upon networks perhaps of people in different countries.

So it is a question of judgement by the law-enforcement agencies. It is a question of how they allocate their resources. But we do know that some types of crime—terrorist related crime is one of them, organised transnational crime and transnational crime is another of them, and paedophilia is another of them—in which the modus operandi, as it were, of those involved peculiarly involves reliance upon networks. It is the mapping of those networks which is particularly important in locating and identifying the actors, and that is something that is facilitated by access to metadata.