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

I move amendment (12) on sheet 7661:

(12) Schedule 1, item 5, page 28 (before line 32), before the definition of Defence Minister, insert:

  content, in relation to a communication, includes the following:

  (a) any speech, music or other sound that forms part of a telephone conversation;

  (b) the body of an email;

  (c) a short text message sent from one telecommunications device to another;

  (d) a website address;

     (e) any other user-generated content.

This amendment is intended to provide a definition of 'content' in the legislation. The lack of a definition of content has caused a great deal of industry disquiet.

I have used two sources in developing this definition. One was comments by Malcolm Turnbull, when he was asked to draw a distinction between metadata and content. However, I have also paid attention to the lengthy enumeration of the kinds of information to be retained and now brought into the bill as a consequence of recommendations of the PJCIS. My hope is that, added together, this will ensure that the law enforcement agencies are always able to distinguish between the two—retained data and content.

As we have heard from the Attorney-General, content is not to be retained, and yet content is not defined. I want to fix that. I want to ensure that the agencies do not deliberately or inadvertently intrude on content simply because there is an absence of definition. Perhaps the definition of 'content' that I have put into my amendment could be improved, but once again my aim here is to improve what is a bad law, not perfect it.

So the purpose of the amendment: there is a definition of what data may be retained. There is a clause which says that, for the avoidance of doubt, content is not to be retained, but 'content' is not defined. The purpose of my amendment is to define 'content', to ensure that it is not retained.