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

The government also opposes this amendment, for reasons that I largely explained yesterday so I will not detain the Senate by speaking for too long. The comments of Mr David Irvine, the former Director-General of Security, have been referred to several times in this debate. It is not merely the case, Senator Ludlam, that Mr Irvine is a supporter of mandatory data retention, which of course he is. Mr Irvine is a supporter of this particular bill. He considers this particular bill meets all of his objectives; in fact, he, probably more than any other witness to the first PJCIS inquiry during the last parliament, was the principal advocate of a mandatory data retention regime. Indeed so frustrated was Mr Irvine by the misrepresentation of remarks attributed to him by a journalist that he contacted my office last week and authorised me to convey that it was his wish that this bill in this form should be passed. Nothing that he said at that seminar and nothing in the words attributed to him by a journalist should be understood to derogate from his view that this bill in the form in which the government presents it to the chamber was the appropriate bill for the chamber to pass.

In relation to cost, you are right, Senator Ludlam: of course companies will look for the lowest-cost option as they always do—that is the way capitalism works. They should do that and they will do that. That is why we must have an appropriately robust framework of laws to ensure that the search for the least-cost option in fulfilling the statutory obligation does not compromise data security.

The telecommunications providers, the internet service providers, which are subject to the obligation created by this bill, are subject to Australian law not just to the obligations created by this bill but to other relevant Australian laws, including the provisions of the Privacy Act to which I referred the chamber last night in the context of the discussion of this issue—and which I will not repeat but with which I am sure, Senator Ludlam, you are familiar. And, as I foreshadowed in my contribution last night, the telecommunications sector security reform—which the government has been working with great effort to develop and which we expect to introduce into the parliament in the second half of this year—the TSSR legislation, is specifically designed to create a very robust, very reliable, framework for the protection and the security of data and of networks.

The suggestion that seems to come from you, Senator Ludlam, that there is a zero-sum game in which every incremental reduction in cost is associated, invariantly, with an incremental reduction in the security of data is wrong. As long as the relevant companies are observant of their legal obligations and as long as the legal framework is sufficiently robust, then we would expect players in a marketplace to gravitate to the least-cost option consistent with their legal obligations. That is the way in which this has been structured.

I do not really think I need to say anything more about the matter. This is, as you said yourself, Senator Ludlam, a borderless environment, so it is, if I may say so, a little simple-minded to suggest that in a borderless environment we should be as conscious of national borders as you seem to be. But what we should be conscious of is the robustness of the legal framework which we have and which the legislation, which I foreshadowed, will further augment.

The CHAIRMAN: The question is that the amendment be agreed to.

Question negatived.