George Brandis (Queensland, Liberal Party, Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you very much indeed, Senator O'Sullivan. That is an important question. May I take this opportunity to welcome you back from the time you spent as the Australian parliamentary delegate to the United Nations in New York, where I know your contribution to the deliberations of the committees on which you sat was significant. No doubt, Senator O'Sullivan, you return to Australia with an even greater awareness than you had heretofore of the importance of these issues. As you know, Senator, the Australian government—with the support, I should say, of the opposition—take these issues extremely seriously, and that is why we have moved on several fronts to put Australia on the best possible footing to protect our national security in an age of networked globalised terrorism.

I have spoken to this chamber before about the legislation that we have put into place, the additional resources we have given to our agencies and the administrative arrangements that we have put in place in order to address this problem, but let me take this opportunity to focus on the other important issue of regional cooperation. Since the Senate adjourned for Christmas I travelled to Jakarta with my junior minister, Mr Keenan, for the inaugural Indonesia-Australia Ministerial Council on Law and Security, where we met with our counterpart ministers: His Excellency Luhut Panjaitan, the Coordinating Minister for Political, Legal and Security Affairs in the Indonesian government, and His Excellency Yasonna Laoly, the Indonesian Minister for Law and Human Rights. We inaugurated a higher level of bilateral cooperation between Indonesia and Australia in relation to national security and counter-terrorism than has ever existed before. It was an extremely successful and an extremely consequential meeting.