David Leyonhjelm (NSW, Liberal Democratic Party) Share this | Hansard source

I indicate my support for the Greens amendment. The Attorney's main objection to this seems to be that it is inconvenient and impractical—on the basis of 340,000 warrants. The question of course arises as to whether or not 340,000 warrants is something we should accept as a reasonable state of affairs anyway. I find it exceedingly disturbing that we should have such a large number of existing intrusions by snoops into our private activities. Indeed, you could argue that instead of being the nanny state we are developing into the spying state.

It is fairly obvious also that, with 21 agencies able to access metadata under the legislation proposed, there will be a need for fewer warrants. If, as the Attorney suggests, their access to metadata will be restricted to serious offences—although I point out that he declined to accept my amendment yesterday to ensure that that was the case—there would also be fewer warrants. The issue under the current regime with 340,000 accesses of existing metadata is that that does not include two years of history. It does not include the extent of the data that is currently accessed. It seems to me not at all unreasonable for a warrant system to apply to the fewer agencies going after serious offenders and more intrusive data.