Duncan Kerr (Denison, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The member for Moreton says he is an egalitarian. Well, bring on the republic, Comrade, and I will be with you, Son. An interesting provision is that members of the royal family are dealt with as having a prescribed status for a special purpose visa, notwithstanding the constitutionally anomalous position of our head of state.

I am content to support the remarks of the shadow minister. He has welcomed this legislation. I think nine-tenths of it deserves that welcome; I am prepared to let the other one-tenth pass into law without objection given that, from a law enforcement perspective, I do understand the rationale for it. But I do express great concern about the way in which this parliament is repeatedly abused by undertakings that are given to it—promises that new, intrusive forms of surveillance will be applied only in particular areas—and which are trashed so routinely, so quickly and with so little regard for any excuse. There is no explanation, no rationale, no reason why an event that is said to have caused considerable difficulty in the law enforcement environment was not dealt with quickly in the same parliament, with an apology for a failure of prescience to plan for that. We are just simply given the legislation and told that there is a crisis that we as parliamentarians need to respond to quickly. When we inquire a little, the only reason we are told that it was not brought forward earlier is that the government could not get priority to have the bill drafted in three years. It could not get a draftsman to have a look at the legislation in three years. That is not a priority, in my view.

What seems to be common to this and other instances which I have experienced as a member of this House is this pattern of abuse of the House and abuse of the chambers, where we are given undertakings and then they are breached without any reason being advanced for the breach and, given those previous undertakings, without even the slightest word of recognition of the seriousness of the step that has been taken.

As we increase the volume of our statute book, as we increase the degree to which those living in Australia are subject to surveillance, subject to the possibility of intrusive actions by law enforcement personnel, we forget those undertakings too readily. It is so easy to say, ‘We will never extend this in this area,’ and then come back a few years later and say, ‘This has caused a great problem.’ Often the members of the House who passed the legislation in the first place can be expected to have forgotten the commitments that were given by the previous government. So, piece by piece, thread by thread, we lose some of the understandings of the importance of individual entitlement that used to be taken as bedrock rights that we as citizens held in common. And piece by piece, thread by thread, we build a new maze of regulatory environments, regulatory obligations, a capacity for exchange of intrusive information across law enforcement agencies and departments of state. Then we cover all this with commitments that are given lip service to for freedom of information and privacy protection, which extend to areas where governments do not have any great interest but, in reality, which are flouted in areas where the citizen seeks to enforce their rights. So, in areas, for example, of freedom of information you can access your own personal information—on your Centrelink file, for example—but, if you try to get some information about government policy and the government objects to its provision, it is refused and it is made difficult and expensive.

If you look at other areas where privacy rights are an entitlement, you see that a number of quite stringent provisions are imposed on the private sector but that government exchange of information of this kind is facilitated. We do not have a significant debate about the terms of that facilitation, and we certainly do not have any acknowledgement that it is in breach of commitments that were given publicly to the community and to this House to explain why we are pressed into a circumstance in which we are told that there is now urgency, when the plain fact is that the government acted with no urgency.

The government did not immediately recognise that it had given an undertaking that was too extensive and did not come back to the House. That would have been the honourable thing to do. Instead, it says that it identified this problem three years ago but has had a problem finding the drafters to fix it. That is not a situation of any urgency, as I see it, and it certainly does not explain why we are told that this now creates a problem of such weight that we do not have an effective explanation for that delay. With those remarks, I will close my speech and invite the honourable member for Moreton, who is tapping his hand impatiently, waiting for his turn, to make an important contribution to the debate.

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