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

Senator Ludlam, you seem to be arguing the opposite proposition from the one you are arguing immediately before the division. Now you are suggesting that service providers might want to retain data that is not the subject of a retention obligation, whereas before, as I understood you, you are saying that service providers are being subject to an unwelcome cost of requiring them to retain data that they would not wish to provide. The fact is that the provisions in section 187A(2) and following set out certain conditions which must be observed in order to bring any potential new dataset within the reach of the obligation of this section 187A(1). If those conditions are not satisfied that the retention obligation is no longer extant and therefore the requirement of section 187A(1) would no longer apply. You make a point about costs having been incurred—I suppose that is at least theoretically possible but, senator, you seem to be assuming, and you take a somewhat paranoid view, if I may say so, sometimes about what government might do, but if the government were of the view, whether it be a Labor government or a Liberal government or who was, at the description of the dataset in the table in section 187A(1) needed to be enhanced, it is hardly likely that it would avoid cooperating with industry. As I said at an earlier stage in the debate, collaboration and cooperation with industry— this is to establish an industry-based scheme—is integral to the operationalisation of this legislation. Secondly, nor is it likely that the government would seek to delay until the last possible statutorily permissible moment the introduction of legislation to give effect to the declaration. You pointed out before that the PJCIS make these recommendations to deal with emergency circumstances. In emergency circumstances the minister may make a declaration. In my case, if I were the Attorney-General, able and I would have thought in case of any rational Attorney, having made such a declaration he or she would want to go to the parliament as soon as possible.