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

I am here today on behalf of the Australian Greens to oppose this bill in the strongest possible terms. In the course of the debate over the next few days, we will spend a lot of time considering elements of the bill in detail: its impact on journalists, the unknown costs, the inevitable mass breaches of privacy that will follow and the technicalities of how the bill will actually work. But, before we disappear into the weeds and the technical detail, I want to state plainly why I believe that this bill is unamendable and why it should be rejected.

This legislation, the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Amendment (Data Retention) Bill 2014, betrays a mindset that inverts the power relationship between the state and the individual. It provides for the mass collection of private information of 23 million people who are neither suspected nor accused of having committed a crime. It entrenches the ability of dozens of government agencies to access these private records hundreds of thousands of times a year without a warrant and it normalises the fiction that this information is nothing more than billing records or the envelope that surrounds substantive communications.

Over a period of many decades, democracy has evolved, developing ways to protect citizens from the power of the state. These are some of the foundation principles of liberalism, from which the hollowed-out entity that proposed this bill takes its name. One of these points of balance is the judicial warrant: if the state wants to violate your privacy, there needs to be a good reason. These reasons include corruption; serious organised or violent crime; crimes against children; or genuine national security threats, including terrorism. In Australia, around 4,700 such warrants are issued every year, and, in a country of 23 million people, that does not seem like an undue amount. The police surveillance scandal in New South Wales has exposed the fact that even these judicial checks and balances sometimes fail, but it is a system which has worked tolerably well for the most part.

The act that we are amending today was written in 1979, under the prime ministership of the recently passed Malcolm Fraser. Mobile phones only existed in Star Trek. The internet was unthinkable for all but a handful of researchers and futurists. Fast-forward to 2015: there are more mobile phones than people in this country and the internet is busily infusing nearly every corner of our lives. Every one of these devices, seen and unseen, generates a cloud of information in the course of its ordinary operation. One single tweet 140 characters long is the tip of a small iceberg of code that runs to about a page and a half. Your phone handset is essentially a tracking device that allows you to make phone calls. Our relationships and our social lives are increasingly mediated by digital tools. Collectively, these devices and apps silently generate billions of records of place, time, contact, data type and volume, all of it aggregated under this loose concept of 'metadata'. Anyone who tells you that these are simple billing records or the innocent envelopes surrounding substantive communications is either technically illiterate or lying to your face.

In 2012-2013, agencies made around 340,000 demands for this information from Telstra, Optus and the rest of the telecommunications industry, without the trouble of having to apply for a single warrant. Now, I do not have more recent numbers than that because the Attorney-General's Department is refusing to publish the report for the last financial year. Telecommunications regulator the ACMA reports 748,000 warrantless authorisations were received by carriers in 2013-14. Why do agencies do this? Here is NSA contractor Edward Snowden:

… metadata is extraordinarily intrusive. As an analyst, I'd prefer to be looking at metadata rather than content because it's quicker and it's easier and it doesn't lie.

Former General Counsel of the NSA, Stewart Baker, said:

If you have enough metadata, you don't really need content.

And, just in case we were not completely clear, consider former CIA Director Michael Hayden's memorable boast of last May:

We kill people based on metadata …

This is a bill to entrench a system of passive mass surveillance. It is corrosive of the very freedoms that governments are elected to protect and it has no place in a democracy. Yet it is a democratically elected parliament that is probably about to enact it, and nothing I say in here this afternoon is likely to change the minds or the votes of the senators from the Liberal, National or Labor parties, who will file in here later this week and vote the way they have been told to vote. Many of them strongly disagree with the bill, and a small handful have spoken out; and a few—we will pay attention to who—will no doubt be absent when the vote is finally taken.

The Liberal Party: if you go to their website, under 'About' and then 'Our Beliefs'—I wonder when was the last time you checked this out, Senator Fifield—here is what it says:

We Believe:

In the inalienable rights and freedoms of all peoples; and we work towards a lean government that minimises interference in our daily lives; and maximises individual and private sector initiative

That is why you have imposed a $400 million surveillance tax on the whole country! Well done!

The Labor Party: how apt that this week we are debating the return of the Australian Building and Construction Commission. Presumably you are aware that this entity, which treated the blues as though they were something worse than terrorists, was doing warrantless metadata surveillance of trade union organisers in its previous incarnation—somewhere between a dozen and 30 warrantless requests per year until we closed it down. I am sure that those union members had nothing to hide and they therefore had nothing to fear from the ABCC.

And so it falls to the Greens and the crossbench to stand up and provide the opposition that this reckless and vicious government so desperately deserves. In this, we represent views that are entirely mainstream. Guess who described metadata retention as a 'sweeping and intrusive new power' when the Labor Party was toying with the idea in 2012?