Kerry Nettle (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I indicate that the Australian Greens will not be supporting these amendments because we have not heard the justification for them. I will raise that when I move my amendments. We think that any access that would be provided needs to be limited to ensuring that it is stopping the financing of terrorism. We have not been provided with the argument as to why ASIS now needs this information. Perhaps the minister can provide more about it.

We have the 30 other agencies. We have ASIS and the AFP. How did it come about? Did ASIS say, ‘Oops, you left us off’? Did the government say, ‘Oops, we left you off’? We just have not heard how this came to be. We are not satisfied that the safeguards are there. We have heard talk about IGIS. We know it has seven, going on eight, staff that people are not aware of in order to make complaints to them. We have heard that there will be a memorandum of understanding and that it will not be made public. Our concerns have not been addressed.

I accept that the minister has gone some way towards seeking to address this. I thank him for the information that he has provided. But he has not been able to provide the information. It may be there. Then we would be satisfied. But the case has just not been made. If there is going to be any access, we think it needs to be far more limited than is proposed under this current piece of legislation. So we are not in a position to support this wider access.

If we had more information then we might be able to support a narrower and more defined access which is limited to stopping the financing of terrorism. But that is not what we have. We have only an open slate, and an open slate is not acceptable to the Greens or, I think, many people in the community. It extends the operations of ASIS and their spying on Australians without the relevant justification. It is to do with the comments I made earlier: when governments ask for these expansions of power to intelligence organisations—to occur behind closed doors—then there needs to be a justification. We have simply not heard that justification or seen the appropriate safeguards to ensure that it is limited to what we all want to achieve, which is stopping the financing of terrorism.