David Leyonhjelm (NSW, Liberal Democratic Party) Share this | Hansard source

I participated in some of the hearings of the Senate committee inquiring into revisions to the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act. Some of the witnesses described how they were voluntarily retaining information about their customers in order to benefit those customers who made subsequent inquiries as to their data usage, essentially. It was not all of them—some of them were doing it. The maximum period that anyone was doing it for was three months. It would seem logical that if you are going to solve a crime three months of metadata would be fairly handy to have. I am just wondering whether consideration might have been given to having the retention period for three months and on what basis did the government decide not to limit it to that period?