Mark Dreyfus (Isaacs, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Hansard source

The federal opposition is determined to ensure that our national security and law enforcement agencies have the powers that are necessary to keep Australians safe. As well as defending our nation's security, Labor also strongly believes in the importance of upholding the rights and freedoms that define us as a democratic nation living under the rule of law. That is why the amendments to the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Amendment (Data Retention) Bill 2014 that are being introduced are so important.

The bill that was introduced into this House on 30 October last year had a number of significant shortcomings. Labor recognised that the bill could not be allowed to pass in the form it was introduced and insisted that the bill be sent to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security with sufficient time for there to be comprehensive scrutiny of the bill and public hearings. As a consequence of the intelligence committee process, 38 significant recommendations for improvements to the bill were made. The government has accepted all of them.

I join with the Minister for Communications in thanking all members of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, particularly the chair, the member for Wannon, and the deputy chair, the member for Holt, for the joint work that was done, under some time pressure, to produce very significant improvements to the bill. I am sure the member for Blaxland, who with me was added to the committee for the purpose of this inquiry, would endorse those comments.

Significant recommendations that were made—all of which are now to be found in the amendments before the House—which are directed at better safeguarding the rights and privacy of Australians under the proposed scheme include: specifying the dataset required to be retained in the bill itself, rather than in regulations; limiting access to telecommunications data to enforcement agencies specifically listed in the bill; authorising ASIC and the ACCC to have access to telecommunications data to assist those agencies in the investigation and prosecution of white-collar crime; requiring telecommunications companies to provide customers access to their own telecommunications data upon request; requiring stored data to be encrypted to protect the security and the integrity of personal information; prohibiting access to retained data for the purposes of civil proceedings—for example, preventing its use in copyright infringement lawsuits; requiring a mandatory data breach notification scheme to ensure telecommunications companies notify consumers if the security of their telecommunications data is breached; increasing the resources of the Commonwealth Ombudsman to strengthen oversight of the mandatory data retention scheme; and, importantly, a mandatory review of the data retention scheme no later than four years from the commencement of the bill.

I would say in summary that these amendments are critically important to making this bill what it should be—a bill that will help our law enforcement and security agencies to make Australians safer but without compromising our rights and freedoms that we, as citizens of democracy living under the rule of law, must also defend. I want to reiterate what I said in this House about the context of this bill. Data retention is not new. Telecommunications data has been retained for many years in Australia, but it has been occurring in a largely unregulated manner by private companies across Australia. And the data that has been retained by private companies has been accessed under the current legislation, the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979, by a large number of agencies, hundreds of thousands of times a year. However, while access to this data is often vital to their operations, technological changes and changing business practices of telecommunications providers mean that less data will be retained by some companies in the future. Given this context, Labor has approached this bill and the negotiations over its amendments as an opportunity to regulate and improve the efficacy of data retention for law enforcement and counterterrorism purposes while at the same time introducing safeguards that will greatly improve the transparency and accountability of both telecommunications data and access to that data.

See this speech in context