Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Minister for Communications) Share this | Hansard source

Amendments (39) and (40) will amend sections 280 and 281 of the Telecommunications Act. The effect is that service providers are no longer permitted to disclose telecommunications data either in response to a subpoena, a notice of disclosure or a court order or as a witness in civil proceedings where the data has been kept solely for the purpose of complying with the proposed new part 5-1A—that is, the new data retention regime—and the data is used or disclosed by the service provider only for that purpose; for a limited range of defined public interest purposes, such as to prevent a threat to life or to assist the telecommunications industry ombudsman in the consideration of a complaint; or for a purpose incidental to one or more of those purposes.

As the honourable member would be well aware, at the moment civil litigants currently do access call charge records, telephone records and dynamically allocated IP address records resolved to the account holders' names, and that is done for a whole variety of civil suit reasons. All of that is available now and there is no limitation on it whatsoever. So, in fact, the bill and the amendments that we are talking about now, which flowed from the committee's work, actually restricts the access of civil litigants to information of this kind.

See this speech in context