Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Firstly, I want to place on the record the frustration of the Australian Greens in having to wait well over a year past the end of the 2015-16 year for the tabling of the 2015-16 report. Having acted for many years as a minister of the crown in Tasmania, I am well aware that annual reports do take some time to compile and to be provided to a minister's office. But I have to say that a delay of some 13 or 14 months is not acceptable to the Australian Greens and ought not to be acceptable to this Senate. This report has been tabled at just a couple of seconds to midnight, a few short minutes before the start of this debate. The timing is highly suspicious. If you want to assuage a small number of the Australian Greens' concerns, you could place on the record, in response to this speech, exactly when that report was received by your office. Either your office has sat on that report or the people compiling the report have taken too long to do so. One or the other of those things must be true. Thirteen to 14 months is too long to wait for a report like that.

In a supercilious and condescending way you have suggested that I either haven't read the bill or don't understand it—neither of which is true. You have again taken exception to my categorisation of this legislation. I will quote again for you from a different section of the Australian Centre for Cyber Security's submission to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security's review of the Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2016. This quote is from page 3

Session Metadata as ‘any information’.

The metadata includes IP (Internet Protocol) source and destination addresses; source and destination port addresses; and protocol numbers. It therefore includes URLs / web browsing history. … This is the session metadata.

Attorney, I stand by my categorisation and the Australian Greens' categorisation of this bill as a surveillance dragnet. I make the point again that your government has got form on surveillance dragnets, specifically the metadata retention scheme.

Attorney, I also wanted to take the opportunity to give you an opportunity to respond to the industry association's explicit concerns that the underlying approach of this bill is flawed and that it is more likely to make Australian telecommunications networks less secure, due to the one-sided, onerous and excessive nature of the obligations contained in this legislation to be imposed on carriers and carrier service providers. Just so that we are clear, I would categorise the submission from the industry association that you are running a very high risk of not only an unintended consequence or unintended consequences that may flow from this legislation but, in fact, that it will be totally counterproductive—that is, it will achieve the very thing that it purports but is failing to address.