Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Given the Attorney responded in detail to precisely none of the questions that I asked in my speech in the second reading debate, we will have to deal with them one by one in the committee stage. I do want to say, given the Attorney's taken his chance on the second reading to personally criticise my understanding of the legislation—a claim, I hasten to add, I rebut and reject entirely—that the Attorney's response to my speech was supercilious and condescending in the extreme. If they didn't invent the word 'supercilious' just for the Attorney, they could have.

Attorney: with regard to whether or not this is a dragnet surveillance of Australians—a claim that you have rejected—I am going to put some information on the record:

The Bill grants the Office of the Attorney-General (AGD), specifically the Attorney General’s Secretary (AGS), the power to collect any type of information from the TelCo:

a. This power is only overseen in terms of an annual report submitted by the AGD to Parliament.

b. This power may be delegated to the Director-General of the ASIO.

c. The ASIO may in turn share the information gathered with the AFP and third parties.

That's actually not an assertion that I am standing here making off my own bat today. What I've just done is read from a submission from the Australian Centre for Cyber Security at the University of New South Wales to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, the closed shop in this place that the crossbench is not represented on.

It is dated 3 February and entitled Submission: review of the Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2016. Attorney, in the view of the experts at the Australian Centre for Cyber Security this bill grants, in effect, you the power to collect any type of information from the telco. It is clearly a surveillance dragnet. That is an entirely reasonable description of what you are standing in this place today proposing that we agree to. So I stand by my comments I made in my second reading speech. I stand by my assertion that this government is rampantly stripping away from the Australian people fundamental rights, including the right of privacy and the right to be forgotten—key digital rights. As well, a plethora of legislation has come through this parliament in recent years designed to allow security agencies in this country to deprive Australians of their freedom, of their liberty and of their right to make choices about how they live their lives, all whilst epically failing to make any kind of case for change. I can assure the Australian people that the Australian Greens will stand up for their rights in this place. We will stand up for their right to privacy. We will stand up for the basic human rights that both the coalition and Labor members work together to strip away on a regular basis.

I will put again the first question I asked in my second reading speech that wasn't responded to by the Attorney. Attorney, why did you table the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979 2015-16 annual report only minutes prior to this debate commencing today? When can we expect the report for the year 2016-17 to be tabled?