Louise Pratt (WA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for the Environment, Climate Change and Water) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak on the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security Amendment Bill. This gives me cause to reflect on a few issues that were very present in my mind when I first entered this place back in 2008. In moving from the state legislature to the federal Senate, I was very self-aware about the fact that as a member of the government, a government backbencher, I would become part of and complicit with some significant decisions on things like sending troops to war, the surveillance of citizens, our civil liberties and the arbitrary detention of people. These were issues that weighed very heavily on my mind then and they are issues I take very seriously today. So when my colleagues put it to me that there is something not quite right and not yet quite good enough about how our parliamentary oversight of these matters is conducted and managed, I take that very seriously.

I know that these amendments are just adjustments in the way we currently operate; but they are important adjustments and they were put forward by no less than former Senator John Faulkner, who himself has reflected very carefully on these issues. What is proposed is the removal of the current constraints on the membership of the committee to provide that except for a minimum representation of one government member and senator and one opposition member and senator the balance of the 11 members of the committee can be drawn from either chamber. The current rules on who is eligible to be a member are fairly arbitrary in terms of saying we have this many from this chamber and that many from that chamber. That does not give the Labor Party, which takes this matter very seriously—or, for that matter, other parties—the capacity to appoint the people who are best placed to scrutinise these issues.

When you have six members and five senators, that is a very arbitrary thing to do. So it is important that this parliament has more flexibility in determining the membership of this joint committee. It will allow for the joint committee to be made up of members who are more expert in this field, without the constraint of whether they are a member or a senator. For example, I remember discussing with my new colleague Anne Aly MP, the member for Cowan, the fact that, while she has considerable expertise in this area, it is very difficult for her to get a position on the committee—because, by the time you put the shadow defence minister on the committee, or the Leader of the Opposition or others who are also a priority, there is no room left for her to be on the committee. So perhaps someone in the Labor Party might like to make a decision that a Labor senator might be able to give up their place for someone like Anne Aly. These constraints also mean that our shadow Attorney-General, the Honourable Mark Dreyfus, has been unable to serve on the committee because of the limited number of positions available to opposition members of the House of Representatives. So having more flexible membership provisions, without affecting the political balance of the committee, would enable the committee to benefit from this experience and expertise.

As previous senators have noted, this bill does not amend the requirement for the government to hold a majority on the committee. As a senator who has been a member of a number of committees and a chair of a committee, I think I am in a good position to reflect on the operation of committees. We are constantly faced with leading to deliberate on and renew our sense of how we balance our decision-making and deal with important national issues. We need to ensure that we connect in this place good decision-making to proper processes that scrutinise all avenues and outcomes of legislation.

The bill provides the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security capacity to conduct its own motions and inquiries after consultation with the responsible minister. I certainly think this is an important provision. When there is public debate about issues such as arbitrary intention or the quality of the intelligence that the parliament and the committee are receiving, there may not always be alignment between the views of the committee and the views of the minister. That means if a committee wants to interrogate those issues further they really need to be able to say to the minister: 'There is an important national security issue at stake here. It is time for us to be able to look more deeply into these issues.' This is an important extension but an essential one to enhance the oversight role of this committee.

This would bring the parliamentary joint committee in line with equivalent parliamentary committees in the US and the UK, which already have this power. But here in the Australian parliament our legislatures have, comparatively speaking, handed more power to government and more power to the agencies, while our parliamentary committees have been relatively more constrained in their capacity for scrutiny. In 2013 the UK's Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament was reformed by the passage of the Justice and Security Act 2013. So we now need to be able to keep up with these international movements.