Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

George Orwell—thank you, Senator Birmingham. He also wrote Animal Farm, I think. In my youth, we used to read Orwell's book Nineteen Eighty-Four, and it depicted a society where on every street lamp there was a camera and everything you did was looked at by Big Brother. In those laissez-faire days of the sixties and seventies, we were all horrified that we might get to 1984 and that these things would be upon us. We are all absolutely certain that could never happen.

Of course, not quite to the extent predicted by George Orwell, we have gone a long way to where some of the normal freedoms we as a society have have been curtailed. I always ask: which impact on society is more important? Sure, we lose some of our freedoms and some of the rights that we may have had in times gone by, but we are fighting an enemy that is so much more organised and so much better resourced than it has been in the past—and that is serious and organised crime, which, I might say, interacts with and in many instances supports terrorism around the world. I have every confidence in the Australian Federal Police, in the Australian Crime Commission, in ACLEI and in all of the Commonwealth law enforcement agencies—and, I might say, almost all of the state enforcement agencies. They are very professional, fair people who do a job protecting society. But in their daily work they compete against serious and organised criminals, who know no rules and have no restraints on what they can do. They do not have any restraints on their resources—the money and the advice they can get, including the support of professionals in various fields such as accountants and lawyers. They have the money to get the very, very best of legal, accounting and other advice, but they do not have to worry about the rules that the police and our enforcement agencies have to worry about. If the police make one minor error in their investigation of a particular matter, it is a front-page headline and everyone is encouraged to think that our police are bad, naughty, corrupt or whatever for often very slight infringements of the rules—but they do have to follow the rules. Of course, as law enforcement people, they have no concern with and no argument against complying with the rules, but it does mean that, every time they go into the fight against serious and organised crime, they do it with one hand tied behind their back. These examinations that were introduced into the Australian Crime Commission Act some time ago have enabled the law enforcement agencies to turn the tables a little, but they are still governed by the law, which their opponents in serious and organised crime of course are not.

So, Mr Acting Deputy President, while in different times or different places—if we lived in a perfect world—some of these provisions that the government brings forward we may be a little uneasy about; but, when it is a question of the lives and welfare of my family or your family versus some of the freedoms we might have to give up, I know I will always go with those whose job is to protect me and my family and everyone else and their families from the ravages of serious and organised crime.

I sometimes give the Greens political party the benefit of the doubt that they are erring on the side of caution—