Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The Australian Greens will be supporting these amendments. They are consistent with what we have been arguing the whole time. The final model that the government and the Labor Party came to has been quite heavily criticised, but nonetheless Senator Collins is quite right: this framework does not actually exist at the moment and, twofold, there is no public interest monitor equivalent at a Commonwealth level. That is something that we have argued for.

In the course of the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act inquiry that we conducted over the last 15 months or so, we heard quite compelling evidence from the public interest monitors that exist in the two states where they do exist that actually it does not slow down the process. What it does is that it provides a measure of contestability in the warranting process. What they found was that the agencies did take a little while to get used to having somebody interposed in the process, who they were not used to being there and who would say, 'Does that need to be this broad? Could this be narrower? Could it be for a briefer period of time? Do you need all of these devices?' Eventually, once the agencies got used to having that process of contestability interposed into the process, it streamlined things and it was in the view of the public interest monitor that we took evidence from that it had actually immeasurably improved the process.

But a have seen the crack in the government's armour with the two acknowledgments that have been made. Firstly, that metadata is not so completely harmless or innocuous that journalists and their sources do not deserve a measure of protection; secondly, that we would introduce therefore a process that is not really the same as ordinary warrants. It is kind of quasi-warranting process. Also, we would introduce a public interest advocate who performs not an identical role, but a similar role, for this narrow category of professionals, as the government has defined them. We have got problems about the way that it is constructed; but I think it does open the door to some of the arguments that we have been running for a couple of years now, as the system requires further safeguards.

What Senator Xenophon has done is make the obvious point here that you can put a better lock on the front door and try to protect the journalists a little bit better than they are at the moment, but the back door is wide open. If somebody, for example, publishes a scoop on the horrors that are unfolding on Manus Island and the government wants to know or police agencies or the federal police are instructed to find out who that journalist is talking to, they will need to go through these new procedures that have been put into place. It is my expectation that, of course, the warrant will be issued. It might take a little bit longer and it might have a few more checks and balances in the way, but no doubt the warrant will be issued.

Nonetheless, that is a piece of process that does not exist at the moment. Of course, the agency is just as likely to go through and scrape the phone records of people working on the island and find out which phone numbers come up. If those numbers match those of a journalist, then you do not really need to go any further. It completely renders obsolete the shield laws that everybody on all sides of the debate just argue passionately in favour of. You do not need to take a journalist to court to find out who they have been talking to; you just find out who they have been talking to. That is part of the problem. All sides of politics—although the government somewhat reluctantly—have recognised that this is an issue, even as the government does continue to try to track down the source of stories that are appearing that it does not like the content of.

What Senator Xenophon's amendment attempts to do—it is difficult to enforce, I suspect, but nonetheless I think the intent is noble—is to ensure that if somebody is reasonably suspected of being a source then they would also be protected. I think that is a noble intention. It goes some way towards improving the kind of protections that most people believe should be in place, but it does not deal with the fundamental issue of the fact that the Australian government is instructing the federal police a reasonable number of times a year to go and find out who is putting unpopular stories into the press. That is disgusting behaviour. We should not be throwing additional procedural hurdles in the way; we should make that very, very difficult to do, if not completely unlawful.

We are happy to commend these amendments to the chamber and hope that they pass.