Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) | Hansard source

I will indeed consider that.

We need to understand what some of the detail is in this legislation. Let's be clear about who can sign the warrants here. The warrants can be signed by the Attorney-General. The warrants don't have to be signed by a judge, as is overwhelmingly usual in our justice system. To make the obvious point, the Attorney-General—so that I don't fall foul of reflecting on a particular person I'll say any Attorney-General—is a political appointment. The Attorney-General is a political appointment made by the Governor-General on the advice of the Prime Minister. That's how we end up with an Attorney-General. They're not an independent person who is going to dispassionately and reasonably apply the law; they're a political appointment. And yet it's the Attorney-General who can sign warrants. The Attorney-General—give me a break!

We've seen what attorneys-general have done over the years. Without even casting my mind very far back, we can look at the case of Witness K—a prime example. We can look at the case of Mr Collaery—another example.

And, as Senator Shoebridge reminds me, more recently Mr David McBride. And what about when we bugged the Timor-Leste embassy, which of course gave rise to the circumstances that Witness K and Mr Collaery found themselves in. Australian history is literally littered with examples of attorneys-general behaving in a highly questionable ways.

Yes. As Senator Shoebridge also reminds me, they're doing the government's dirty work. Our history is littered with it. And then you bring in a bill that's going to let the Attorney-General sign a warrant.

They don't have to suspect that you did anything wrong; they could just be putting the shakes on you. Shaking you down, squeezing you for information. This is absolutely police state stuff, surveillance state stuff. And people know that they are living in a surveillance capitalist society where you get surveilled by corporations like Coles when you go to the supermarket. They've got a contract with Palantir, one of the most evil corporations that exists anywhere in the world—one of the most dangerous corporations that exists anywhere in the world. They know they're going to get surveilled, that digital recognition software will be deployed. They get you in the aisles; they get you in the check-outs. People understand that's happening in the capitalist parts of our society, the big corporate controlled parts of our society, and people need to understand it's happening with regard to the state.

Do you remember the absolute uproar when a former Labor government tried to introduce the Australia card? How far down the road to a surveillance state have we travelled since those days? Quite rightly, Australians back then were concerned about the government centralising information that the state held on individual people. There was an absolute uproar about it. Well, here we find ourselves, because of the curtailment of these debates by the so-called parties of government, where these laws are being smuggled through this parliament. There was no committee, no public inquiry and no opportunity for these laws to be scrutinised even in the committee stage of the Senate. Here we are, again, where fundamental rights and freedoms that Australians, fought, bled, killed and died to protect back in the day, including family members of mine and ancestors of mine who died in wars against totalitarian and fascist states. Here we are becoming one. It's pathetic.

It's mostly pathetic from the so-called parties of government in this place, where we have a Labor Party that has completely lost its way, captured by fossil fuel interests, captured by Zionist interests, captured by the Five Eyes security—