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

I thank the honourable member for his question. The minister, as I am sure the honourable member is aware, is the minister responsible for the organisation, which is ASIO, and that is the Attorney-General. Under the existing law, the minister is responsible for giving warrants to ASIO when ASIO seeks warrants. I am sure the member for Denison is very familiar with all of this given his background. So the process with respect to ASIO has the issuing authority as the minister—that is, the Attorney-General—and with respect to the AFP and the enforcement agencies it is a judge or magistrate and so forth. If you are on the public interest advocate panel, I suspect you would spend a long, long, long time waiting for the opportunity to make a submission in respect of a warrant application relating to a journalist to the Attorney-General. It is a rare occurrence even with the police, but a very rare occurrence with ASIO.

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