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

On the face of it, this Telecommunications Legislation Amendment Deregulation Bill 2014 is a fairly inoffensive bill, dealing with a number of fairly uncontroversial deregulation measures. This is interesting, given that the fanfare that accompanied the deregulation days that the government started out with have subsided somewhat—but, nonetheless! A large part of the measures deal with the removal of regulations which were introduced at particular times and for particular reasons which have now become largely obsolete—partly due to the march of technology.

I am just going to raise two issues today, particularly that of the extension of useful provisions of worthwhile government programs such as the Do Not Call Register. My understanding is that unless this bill passes this sitting week—unless we manage to spill it out to budget week—that people who have placed themselves on a Do Not Call Register—something which the Greens strongly support—would find themselves rolling off. In fact, that record would lapse and people would start getting unsolicited telemarketing calls and so on. That is not something that anybody in here supports. We are very happy to make sure that that program does not lapse.

I would draw attention to some bizarre behaviour by the communications minister, Malcolm Turnbull, on his Facebook page, proposing that the Labor Party and the Australian Greens are putting the Do Not Call Register at risk. He knew absolutely damn well that that was not the case. Presuming that Senator Conroy or Mr Clare had made this claim, we certainly indicated directly to Mr Turnbull's office that we certainly had no intention of holding up these provision of the deregulation bill. They are completely uncontroversial and I think the blowback on Mr Turnbull's Facebook page from that rather peculiar intervention probably speaks for itself.

The management of this bill itself has been a bit of a case study in how not to handle legislation—the very fact that we are getting into it almost at the end of March is a case in point. The bill was introduced last October, right in the middle of the debate about the government's controversial data retention legislation, which we will return to properly sometime this morning. One of the things that this bill originally did was weaken the reporting obligations regarding data requests. And there has been a certain amount of confusion. The police, anticorruption agencies and other enforcement agencies are required to report to the Attorney-General's Department every year how many warrantless authorisations and how many warranted interception requests for stored communications and live communications they require. It is not a bad reporting obligation. We like to see more detail produced, particularly on the number of people who are caught up. But, nonetheless, that amounts in aggregate to about 340,000 warrantless metadata requests a year, including prospective requests, by our agencies to track people around the landscape effectively in real time. It is about 340,000 a year in total and about 4,700 warranted interception requests. That is what the police agencies are obliged to report under the TIA Act.

What telecommunications providers are required to report to the ACMA, however, is an entirely different matter, and the total aggregate number is nearly three-quarters of a million. Presumably, what is happening is that agencies are submitting requests for their logging as one but they are putting them out to multiple telecommunications carriers so the aggregate is nearly three times higher. I guess that in pushing the deregulation broom through places where does not belong that maybe Mr Turnbull was not even aware of this. It was actually proposing to abolish that reporting requirement to the ACMA so that the public would have no idea of the total number of warrantless authorisations that have been requested.

On registering the backlash that immediately erupted when people realised what he was proposing to do, Minister Turnbull had the good sense to make those provisions of the bill disappear and render this bill largely uncontroversial. There was a brief Senate inquiry conducted into the bill, which ended in re-referral back to the committee as some senators were concerned that arrangements involving Telstra, NBN Co and TUSMA would have some bearing on the bill. Senator Carr addressed this briefly.

I think this is one example of how not to manage a bill through the parliament but, nonetheless, as I have indicated and as Senator Carr has indicated, the measures contained herein are largely uncontroversial—partly because Minister Turnbull had the good sense to remove the sting in the tail that would have removed important information from the public domain.

On behalf of the Australian Greens I am happy to commend this bill to the chamber.