Jason Clare (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Communications) Share this | Hansard source

As I said in the second reading debate on the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Amendment (Data Retention) Bill 2014, this is complex and controversial legislation, and that is why it was appropriate that it be referred to the Parliamentary Joint Standing Committee on Intelligence and Security for proper consideration and proper investigation. The work the committee did demonstrated that the legislation in its original form is not good enough and that there do need to be substantial changes to it. And we do believe that the recommendations the committee made are faithfully represented in these amendments before the House now and that they substantially change this legislation. We believe that in its original form the legislation gives too much power to the Attorney-General to decide what metadata should be kept and who should have the rights to access it and does not provide sufficient oversight over the use or potential misuse of this legislation. Therefore, we made 38 substantial recommendations in all, which are represented in something like 74 amendments that will be considered by the House now in two tranches.

In particular, it is recommended that the definition of metadata, or the dataset, should be in this legislation rather than left to regulation. That provides real certainty for telcos about what they should keep and what they do not have to keep. It is also recommended that it should be the parliament that decides which agencies should have the right to access this metadata, and that it not be left to government—to the Attorney-General—to decide by regulation.

It is recommended that the data itself should be encrypted to provide a higher level of security.

It is recommended that people should have the right to access their own data. This has been unclear in the past. It will be clear now because of this amendment. Once again, I just want to recognise that Telstra quite recently announced that it would do this, as of 1 April.

It is recommended that we establish, for the first time, a data breach notification system, so that if your data is hacked into you will be notified of it. The former Attorney-General, my friend Mark Dreyfus, introduced legislation to do this in the last parliament. On the prorogation of parliament, that lapsed. Now, because of this recommendation and the government's agreement to implement it, that will happen as well.

Extra resources are recommended for the Ombudsman. Oversight here is critical. If you give law enforcement agencies more power it is important that you also equally increase the oversight of those powers. The Ombudsman said that they are very able to do this work, but they need additional resources—about 12 additional staff, which will require about $2 million in the first year and about $1.65 million thereafter. We recommended that that occur, and the government has agreed to do that.

We also recommended that for the first time the Parliamentary Joint Standing Committee on Intelligence and Security should have the same sorts of powers that its equivalents in the United States and the UK have—the power to conduct investigations into the operations of national security agencies in respect of this legislation. This will now be possible for the first time. It is an important first step in the implementation of the John Faulkner reforms. His proposition, introduced into the Senate, was that this committee should have those powers with respect to national security agencies generally. We think that is an important reform, which we will continue to press for.

Finally, there is the issue of costs. This is important because this is not an inexpensive scheme. This is expensive. The PwC work shows a wide arc of potential cost between about $180 million and over $300 million. That work focuses on capex; we do not have specific details yet on opex. In the committee's work, we made the point that it is very important that, in the funding model that is developed, the government has special consideration for small ISPs—sometimes very small businesses that might have less capacity to implement this scheme than your Telstras of the world, or Optus or Vodafone. Quite legitimately, the Australian telco industry, represented by Communications Alliance, wrote a letter recently to the minister and to the Attorney-General asking that the government provide industry, the parliament and the wider community with a degree of certainty as to the size of the government's planned contribution and the planned methodology for apportioning those funds between CSPs of differing types and market shares. I think this is a valid point. Industry will bear a significant proportion of this cost. The minister has indicated that the government will bear a substantial proportion of the cost, but a significant proportion will still be borne by industry—big and small. I seek the assistance of the minister in providing more information in this regard.

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