Joe Ludwig (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Manager of Opposition Business in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

I think we might have dealt with it in part yesterday, but only to make it plain why Labor does support these amendments. What Senator Nettle is proposing is quite a unique position. She is opposing the idea that the Director-General of ASIS may communicate AUSTRAC information to a foreign intelligence agency. We have the AUSTRAC CEO, with the relevant safeguards and oversight, and the Director-General of ASIS, who, I presume, is a responsible person as well in terms of both his capacity as Director-General of ASIS and the act under which he works. The act also provides a limit to the work they can do which is offshore in that sense for foreign intelligence service.

What you then do is say that AUSTRAC cannot provide information to a foreign intelligence agency. But you have already accepted that AUSTRAC can, under existing legislation, provide information to a foreign intelligence agency. So we have the unique position where AUSTRAC can provide information to a foreign intelligence agency through what the current law allows, but the Director-General of ASIS cannot. If for some reason the government were to take up your position, it would not change one fact: they would get it in any event, just through another route.

This is a sensible amendment. It allows the Director-General of ASIS to communicate AUSTRAC information to a foreign intelligence agency in that instance rather than going through the bureaucratic loop that is currently in the legislation. What is then proposed from the Greens perspective is to add a bureaucratic loop. The information will still flow. On that basis I have not been persuaded by your argument as to why this should not be supported.