Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Labor's ill-considered private member's bill, the Telecommunications Amendment (Repairing Assistance and Access) Bill 2019, is indicative of an opposition willing to play politics, and destructively so, with Australia's national security. It highlights why Labor is not fit to govern. It exposes the Labor leadership's manic determination to play partisan politics with any issue—even the top priority of national security. Australians are rightly repulsed by such behaviour.

Labor's bill seeks to amend the Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment (Assistance and Access) Act 2018. Back then, only two wannabes in the House of Representatives voted against it. A message to Senator Keneally and the Labor senators in this place: Labor actually voted for the legislation. Yet here comes Senator Keneally, condemning the whole process as somehow some great infringement of human rights, et cetera. Well, you can make that argument out if you want to, but what it does not overcome is the fact that our good friends in the Australian Labor Party actually supported the legislation at the time. I commend them for it, but why they are seeking to undo all the good work they did at the time is quite frankly beyond me, other than a shadow minister seeking to project herself yet again into the media spotlight for any reason whatsoever. I think that might be the reason we have this private member's bill before us.

The TOLA bill was considered about a year ago. It was required to enable our law enforcement and national security agencies to deal with the challenges of the ever-advancing technologies which have the capacity to be employed for both good and evil. I speak specifically of encryption, a development allowing for the protection of personal, commercial and government information—on the face of it, a good thing. But, as we might imagine, advances in technology are exploited by unsavoury elements within our community and within the world community—such as terrorists, paedophiles, drug traffickers, human traffickers, and the list goes on. Indeed, we are told that 95 per cent of ASIO's dangerous counterterrorism targets use encrypted communications. So encryption is a very real issue for our law enforcement agencies. It therefore stands to reason that, to protect us, our law enforcement agencies need a framework to engage with relevant industry stakeholders.

The regime that was proposed was passed by the parliament, I remind Senator Keneally and her colleagues, on a bipartisan basis. Today we have a tawdry attempt from Senator Keneally—