Rex Patrick (SA, Centre Alliance) Share this | Hansard source

That's very helpful, Minister. So, in actual fact, the parliament will be made aware of a great deal of detail about the call-out. But in terms of the decision-making process—we're talking about what deliberations took place and what input was provided to those deliberations—clearly, the parliament can ask questions of ministers about that, or perhaps call an inquiry, for example. In relation to things like intelligence information, where that may have been fundamental to the decision to call-out, or mixed in with other aspects, such as political aspects, it could have been a failure of intelligence. Once again, no disrespect to the intelligence services. Sometimes those mistakes are made and are unavoidable. Noting there are understandable restrictions on conducting inquiry about those sorts of matters in a public forum like this chamber, is there any provision for the PJCIS to examine a call-out in detail? Does the current legislation, namely the Intelligence Services Act, which prevents the reviewing of operational oversight or perhaps intelligence related matters, prevent that?