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

[by video link] Here we go again, the major parties jamming legislation through this place without adequate scrutiny, which fundamentally erodes the rights and freedoms of Australian citizens and other people who live in and visit our country. I want to be clear about how we find ourselves here yet again today. Australia's intelligence and security apparatus decides that it wants more powers. Let's be frank, they always want more powers. It's in their very nature to want more powers. For more insight into this, just read two speeches from probably Australia's most powerful and influential public servant, the secretary of the home affairs department, Mr Michael Pezzullo. Check out his hobbit speech from 2017 and check out what I call 'Pezzullo's panopticon speech' from last year. They'll tell you everything you need to know about the eternal grasping for yet more surveillance and control powers that our security and intelligence agencies engage in.

They decide they want more powers and they go to the government. The government says: 'Yes, of course, you can have any more powers you want because it plays well for us politically. We'll use the threat of terrorists to scare voters and that will help us win the next election because frightened people don't want to change government.' So then the legislation goes to cabinet, it's tabled in the parliament and then off it goes into the closed shop of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, where only the two major party groups in this place are represented. The crossbench, except in exceptional circumstances, is locked out of any inquiry the PJCIS conducts. The inquiry, as usual, gets out the rasp and rasps off a couple of the absolute roughest edges of the legislation, leaving the bulk of the new powers and functions completely intact.

The legislation then passes the other place, with both government and opposition support, and then comes to the Senate. The crossbench attempts to refer the legislation for a proper, public, thorough Senate inquiry. This is refused, of course, by the major party duopoly. The bill is then passed through the Senate, with only the Australian Greens and sometimes other crossbench senators opposing. Rinse and repeat and off we go again. The intelligence agencies think they deserve more powers and the cycle begins over. Colleagues, this is how fascism starts—a relentless, creeping frogmarch down the dark path to a police state, a surveillance state, towards authoritarianism, totalitarianism and ultimately fascism. Don't say you weren't warned, because you have been warned repeatedly.

We've heard a lot in this debate about how there are all these safeguards around warrants that are actually ultimately issued by the Attorney-General. Well, given the former Attorney-General's decision to authorise the prosecution of Bernard Collaery and Witness K, Australian patriots who we should be thanking rather than prosecuting, it can hardly be said to comfort Australians that the Attorney-General ultimately has sign-off powers on the relevant warrants.

Let's not forget that the hundreds of pieces of counterterror and antiterror legislation that have passed through state, territory and Commonwealth parliaments in this country in the past two decades—and I do mean hundreds of pieces—they were sold to the Australian people as necessary to protect us from the scourge of terrorism. When those pieces of legislation pass, what happens? That's right: they are used for other purposes than for which they were sold to us. For example, the metadata retention laws opposed and campaigned against strongly by the Australian Greens were sold to the Australian people as necessary to protect us from terrorists. Those laws now enable local governments in Australia, without a warrant, to use people's metadata to prosecute them for having unregistered dogs. I've heard of scope creep, but that is on another level.

These laws effectively allow some of Australia's intelligence and security agencies, in some circumstances, to spy on Australians in ways that are currently unlawful. They should not be jammed through this Senate without a proper, thorough, rigorous and public inquiry. Yet here we find ourselves today with the major party duopoly, the Coles and Woolworths of Australian politics, once again coming together to remove fundamental rights and freedoms from the Australian people. That is why we need a charter of rights in this country. Australia is the only liberal democracy in the world that does not have some form of charter or bill of rights, whether that be legislatively enshrined or constitutionally enshrined. Such a charter or bill of rights would not mean that bills like this could not pass, and it would not mean that intelligence agencies and security agencies could not have the powers that they need to a reasonable level to keep people safe. But what it would mean is that there would be extra scrutiny, extra accountability and perhaps a check on this relentless, creeping frogmarch that we are engaged in as a country.

This is a dangerous, dangerous path that we are on and, at some stage, we're going to need to pause, we're going to need to take a breath and we're going to need to re-evaluate this direction because, if we don't, the danger is that we will end up in an authoritarian, totalitarian and—horrendously and potentially—a fascist state.