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

He was not on a so-called watch list at the time. The main point about metadata is it is primarily an investigative not a surveillance tool. It cannot be a surveillance tool, and I think, with respect, Senator Xenophon, you are confusing the American experience with the Australian experience. As I tried to explain to you before, in America the agencies collect the metadata, and I daresay some of the metadata held by the agencies in the United States are used for surveillance purposes. But in Australia no government agency collects metadata. It does not today and it will not as a result of this bill.

This is, as I say, a retention obligation imposed on the private sector, not an obligation to surrender that to a government agency. In a way, you can regard this bill as being as prosaic as a bill about business records. Just as, under the Taxation Administration Act, we oblige people to retain their tax records for five years, so we are obliging telcos to retain metadata for two years. This is a bill essentially about the retention of business records. But they are business records which potentially have a usefulness in an investigation. For that reason, ordinarily, the utility of this will be ex post facto for investigative purposes, rather than, as I said before, for surveillance purposes, which is not why it exists.

Coming to the second point I understand you to be making, I think we should leave it to the agencies to judge what information is useful to them because it is not the agencies that collect or hold this information. It is the agencies that seek the information, that require it to be provided to them by the ISPs that hold it. In making that request, as they do now, the agencies make a professional judgement as to what particular items of metadata are useful to an investigation.