Matt Gregg (Deakin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Australia faces an increasingly complex and challenging security environment. Both state and nonstate actors have shown increasing sophistication in the way they try to advance sometimes nefarious causes. We need a strong and robust intelligence framework, and our national intelligence community delivers that. There is no doubt our security agencies do a fantastic job of keeping Australians, individuals, businesses and communities safe. But we live in a democracy, so we need to make sure that, as with all government organisations, there is robust oversight and accountability and that our democratic system remains at the apex of our system.

This bill, the Strengthening Oversight of the National Intelligence Community Bill 2025, ensures two layers of protection. We have the expert oversight of the inspector-general as well as the democratic oversight of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security. The joint committee is a very special part of our democratic system. It is a committee that has historically sat, and continues to sit, above partisan lines, where there is a genuine commitment from people all across the political spectrum to ensuring the safety and security of Australians, and good faith efforts to ensure that is the focus of that committee. It is well placed to provide that democratic oversight in a way that balances the need to ensure secrecy where required and subtlety when that's sufficient, and ensure there is nevertheless still robust oversight of the use of what are extraordinary powers of our intelligence organisations.

The member for Sturt gave the example of the compulsive powers of the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission. That is one example of exceptional powers given to our intelligence organisations to enable them to do their jobs. But, for public trust and confidence to be safeguarded, we need to ensure that there is oversight and that members of the public can be confident those exceptional powers continue to be used appropriately, in the national interest and proportionately, and that their use is appropriately adapted to the threat environment we face.

This legislation is probably the most significant update to the oversight of our intelligence community since the royal commissions of the 1970s and 1980s—the Hope royal commissions. It is ensuring that there is a consistent framework for the oversight of the 10 agencies that sit within the national intelligence community and that there is a consistent, robust and democratically accountable framework for overseeing the important work they do. It strengthens democratic accountability and supports the effective and robust delivery of a modern intelligence suite of services. It ensures that, while oversight is there, we are still able to confidently empower those organisations to do the important work they need to do. It is an increasingly challenging, sophisticated and multipronged threat environment.

We know our intelligence organisations work incredibly well together, sharing intelligence where appropriate and ensuring they're coordinating with partners to the extent that that falls within their legal remit. That coordination is essential because criminal organisations and nefarious state actors don't follow the same rules we do. We need to ensure our framework enables flexibility for our security agencies to do their job well and to conduct themselves in a way that is consistent with the parliamentary democracy we find ourselves in and a society and culture that maintains respect for the rights and freedoms of individuals—and ensures that those rights, when they are limited through the right to privacy or the right not to participate in legal proceedings, are curtailed only to the extent necessary to protect human life or the essential interests of the country, and makes sure that we are always ensuring that the legal frameworks that sit around these things are proportionate and fair.

That is why we have independent oversight of national security legislation. We have a dedicated monitor that looks at our antiterrorism laws to ensure that they are not disproportionate, continue to meet the needs of intelligence organisations, continue to ensure it is possible for us to respond effectively to the threats and challenges faced by our country but at the same time not go overboard, and continue to ensure that Australians can remain confident that there is accountability, that our organisations do no more than is appropriate and reasonably adaptable to the important work they do, and that a mistrust that can sometimes develop from a lack of oversight and accountability can be addressed.

We know that, when things are kept secret, there's always more room for suspicion, more room for innuendo and more room for unfair assumptions to be made. We do need to ensure that, to the greatest extent possible, there is transparency about the way we do things and that the rules of the game are nice and clear, but that obviously doesn't mean that every single intelligence operation and every security threat is going to be openly disclosed to the public. Obviously that would adversely impact the important work the agencies do. So, while there needs to be a level of secrecy, Australians should be able to be confident that the rules of the game balance their rights and interests appropriately and that there are those two layers of oversight and checks, both from experts, such the inspector-general, and through their democratically representatives on the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security. This will ensure we can, as a people, remain confident that our security agencies are continuing to do the good and important work they're doing, that they're keeping Australians safe and that the frameworks we have in place will continue to enable them to appropriately respond to the environments they find themselves in.

I proudly commend this bill to the House and look forward to seeing its passage.

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