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

To Senator Gallagher's amendment, I move:

At the end of the motion, add:

"but, in respect of the Cyber Security Bill 2024, the Intelligence Services and Other Legislation Amendment (Cyber Security) Bill 2024, and the Security of Critical Infrastructure and Other Legislation Amendment (Enhanced Response and Prevention) Bill 2024, the provisions of the bills be referred immediately to the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee for inquiry and report by 4 February 2025".

Briefly, I want to say that we all understand, or at least all of us in the Greens understand, what is going on here. This is where the establishment parties, the so-called parties of government in this place, get together and effectively collude to refer really critical pieces of legislation to the closed shop of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, which, of course, has no crossbench members on it and—barring a brief period of time when Mr Wilkie had the balance of power in the House of Representatives—hasn't had any crossbench members on it for many decades.

We all know how this goes. The bills disappear into the smoky back room of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security. There might be the odd rough edge rasped off those bills through negotiations between the major parties, but they effectively come out unchanged because the intelligence and security apparatus in this country always gets what it wants out of the major parties. Then, those bills, having possibly had one or two of the roughest edges rasped off them, if we are lucky, come into this Senate and, once again, the establishment parties collude to ram them through. So rights and liberties continue to get eroded because we remain really the only so-called liberal democracy in the world that doesn't have a charter of rights or a bill of rights. The ongoing series of well over 200 pieces of legislation that have passed through state, territory and Commonwealth parliaments in the last 20 years continue to get watered down and erode the fundamental rights and freedoms that many Australians, including ancestors of mine, fought and died to protect and enhance. That's because the major parties are not prepared to stand up to the intelligence and security apparatus in this country.

We want this legislation to be examined in public by the legal and constitutional affairs committee, which does have a crossbench member—and a very capable one, I might add—in the form of Senator Shoebridge. That is what we should be doing with legislation like this that erodes fundamental rights and freedoms, and that is why the Greens are moving this amendment.