Sarah Henderson (Corangamite, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Amendment (Data Retention) Bill 2014. This bill represents another key element of the government's comprehensive plan to combat terrorism and fight crime. More than 25 countries around the world have implemented data retention laws similar to those proposed in this bill.

Before I go to some of the elements of this bill, I want to take particular issue with the contribution by the member for Perth in this debate. Anyone listening to the member for Perth would think that Labor was opposing this bill, with her inflammatory language and her hysterical claims. Anyone would think that the bill was introduced into the House yesterday. Well, I am very pleased to reiterate that those members opposite, the Labor Party, are supporting this bill. The member for Perth's contribution largely has attempted, at least, to undermine the bipartisan efforts that we have seen, to a large degree, by the opposition in improving various national security measures.

Let us go to the facts. The facts are that the bill was first introduced by the Minister for Communications into this House last October. It was referred to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, chaired by Dan Tehan, who, I have to say, has done a wonderful job. They ran an inquiry for a number of months in relation to this bill. They made 39 recommendations. All of them were unanimous. A unanimous report was handed down on 27 February 2015. There were some unanimous recommendations in relation to improving a range of elements in the bill, with examples like: the dataset and the agencies nominated should be in the legislation rather than in the regulatory instruments.

Importantly—and I want to emphasise this—this has largely been a very successful example of how the government and the opposition have worked together to come up with a bill to combat terrorism and to keep Australians safe and secure. As I have spoken about previously in this place, Australia currently faces some extremely significant national security challenges. Recent attacks in Australia and elsewhere around the world show that no country is immune from the threat of terrorism. Even in the past number of months we have seen some truly horrific acts of terrorism in Australia and abroad. There was of course the Martin Place siege in Sydney in December 2014, which rocked the nation to its very soul. There was the terrible attack on the magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris in January this year. There were the Copenhagen shootings in February this year and, going back, the terrible attack in September last year by the teenager in Endeavour Hills who stabbed two counter-terrorism officers and, as we know now, was shot and died in that attack.

The rise of ISIL, or Daesh, has no doubt caused an increase in terrorist activity. Australia's national terrorism public alert level was raised to high in September 2014. At that point, again we saw a very unfortunate demonstration by the member for Perth. There was a report in The Sydney Morning Herald on 13 September, 'Labor MP breaks ranks on bipartisan terror stance', about how she was undermining the opposition's strong bipartisan efforts to work with the government to introduce the legislation that we need to keep Australians safe and secure. The member for Perth made some frankly disgraceful comments referring to the Prime Minister as a 'terror'—appalling inferences. I just want to reiterate that the Leader of the Opposition said:

The Prime Minister and I are partners when it comes to matters of national security and protecting Australians. We are in this together.

As I say, we have seen a very unfortunate contribution from the member for Perth across the range of this debate.

In February 2015 Prime Minister Tony Abbott announced that the number of serious investigations continues to rise. As the Prime Minister outlined, ASIO is currently investigating several thousand leads and persons of concern. Roughly 400 of these are high-priority cases, which is more than double a year ago.

Debate interrupted.

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