Jenny Ware (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak in support of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Amendment Bill 2023. The coalition is fully supportive of this legislation. Governments have no greater responsibility than the protection of their citizens. This bill deals with the work that is done by our security organisations, most of which is, by necessity, done in secret. I will take this opportunity to thank all of those men and women who work within our intelligence organisations for the work that they do in protecting all of us. I'm very grateful that I was in the House for the speech from my friend the honourable member for Fisher, who serves on the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, and I commend his speech to the House.

We live in unprecedented times. It is unfortunate, but we face threats from foreign interference and espionage, and these threats must be taken seriously. This legislation is concerned primarily with streamlining and centralising the way that we provide top secret vetting processes within ASIO and other organisations.

The bill has a series of objectives. One of those is to enable more persistent, ongoing evaluations of an individual's suitability to hold a security clearance. In the times in which we live, we have recently signed the AUKUS arrangement that will provide nuclear powered submarines and really builds on our relationship with our very important allies the United States and Great Britain. The work that will need to be done on those submarines will necessitate us utilising skills from the US and also from Great Britain. So it is very important in that context that we as a country not only protect our own national secrets but also are confident that those who have access to the secrets of our allies are people suitable to hold those very important clearances.

The legislation also establishes a framework for a merits review of ASIO's security clearance decisions. This is important. It's a fundamental of our legal system that, where governments and government departments are able to make decisions about us, every individual should have an opportunity to be able to review those decisions if he or she is aggrieved. So that is an important part of this process.

The last stated objective of the legislation is to provide the Office of National Intelligence with a new function to drive the uplift of insider threat capabilities across the Commonwealth. That is also very important.

Just by way of background: there are currently five separate vetting agencies that are authorised to grant positive vetting security clearances. The committee and others have said that this model has resulted in different applications and standards of this policy aligned to individual missions and requirements. So the purpose of the legislation is to ensure that there is a more streamlined and singular process when considering whether or not an individual should be granted this very important level of clearance.

It has come about, overall, from a multiagency Future Positive Vetting Capability Taskforce that was established under the coalition government back in July 2020. Its stated purpose was to modernise the whole-of-government vetting standards to enable increased consistency, heightened assurance and transferability of Australia's highest cleared workforce. That task force has met and has come out with recommendations, and the government is seeking to put those recommendations into legislation.

To conclude, the bill is supported. It is a sensible piece of legislation; it is an important piece of legislation. The process by which security clearance is granted is important. As I said in my opening remarks, a government has no greater responsibility than the protection of its citizens and it needs to ensure that those citizens and those workers that have access to our national secrets are properly vetted and are of sound character. For all of those reasons, I commend this bill to the House.

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