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

Here we go again. The government is going to now vote against an important safeguard that the Senate yesterday agreed should be inserted into this legislation. This bill, taken as a whole, continues to erode fundamental rights and freedoms in our country. This is a very dangerous path, and most Australians, quite frankly, have very little idea about the rate at which their fundamental rights and freedoms are being eroded by this government. We used to send Australians, including members of my family, overseas to fight and, in some tragic cases, to die to protect and enhance these rights and freedoms, and now the government is removing these rights hand over fist.

Let's be really clear: the police already have perfectly adequate powers to maximise security at our airports. If an AFP officer has a reasonable suspicion that someone is engaging in behaviour that is a security risk or potentially a terrorist activity, they already have abundant powers to intervene and arrest. That is the fact of the matter.

This legislation gives the AFP extraordinary new powers to demand, under very lightly mandated circumstances, that Australians show them identification at an airport and to remove people if they either cannot or will not do that. This is 'papers, please' legislation—or, in the words of another language used at a very frightening time in human history, 'Papiere, bitte!' That's what we're dealing with here. It's 'papiere, bitte' legislation. We won't be supporting it. We will be voting in a moment to keep the safeguard in, which the Senate agreed yesterday ought to be put in.

This government often goes to the people and talks about the need to remove freedoms. They inevitably couch their arguments in the context of counterterrorism. I want to raise one example. A few years ago, when the metadata retention legislation came in—opposed, I might add, by the Australian Greens and supported by both major parties in this place—that pup was sold to this parliament and to the Australian people as being necessary to engage in counterterrorism activities. But let's have a look at who has actually used the metadata that has been retained by internet service providers, as they are required to under the legislation. It's now being used by local councils to bust people for having unregistered dogs. That's what metadata is now being used for.

Every single person in this chamber is having their metadata retained for two years now under a mandatory data retention framework that is being used not exclusively for counter-terrorism purposes, as we were promised by the government and the Attorney-General, former Senator Brandis, at the time; it is now being used by local governments to bust people for having unregistered pets. That's the bracket creep you inevitably see on most pieces of legislation that remove fundamental rights and freedoms. We are the only liberal democracy in the world that doesn't have some form of charter or bill of rights. It is time we had a charter of rights in this country—something to slow this government down in the relentless power grab it is engaged in here, taking away rights that my family members died to protect and enhance in world wars in the past. We won't be supporting this government's attempt to remove this really important framework and safeguard from this legislation.