SENATE

16 SENATE Thursday, 13 October 2016
mandates a composition of six members and five senators on a parliamentary joint committee. Removing the
current constraints will provide parliament with greater flexibility in determining its membership of the joint
committee, but the bill does not amend the requirement for the government to hold a majority.
This provision is important because it means that senators can be equally represented on this committee. There
is no reason why the House of Representatives needs to be disproportionally represented on this committee. As I
have said previously, national security is a job for all parliamentarians, not just members of the House of
Representatives. Again, to clarify, the bill does not amend the requirement for the government to hold the
majority, but it does mean there are fewer constraints placed on the choice of members for the committee based on
the chamber in which they sit.
There are a number of other amendments that this bill provides, and, in the interest of time, I will only very
briefly refer to them. The bill also provides for the parliamentary joint committee to conduct own-motion inquiries
after consultation with the responsible minister. It may be that matters come to the attention of the joint committee
that equally require examination that the minister may not have necessarily considered such a priority, so I think it
is a good move to give the committee the power to conduct inquiries on its own motion.
The bill authorises the Independent National Security Legislation Monitor to provide the joint committee with a
copy of any report on a matter referred to it by the committee. That is an important step to make sure that the joint
committee stays informed of all developments on these matters. The bill requires the Inspector-General of
Intelligence and Security to give the joint committee a copy of any report provided to the Prime Minister or a
minister within three months.
The bill gives the joint committee the function of conducting pre-sunset reviews of legislation containing sunset
provisions and adds the Independent National Security Legislation Monitor and the National Security Adviser to
officers that are able to be consulted by the parliamentary joint committee. Again those two roles, the Independent
National Security Legislation Monitor and the National Security Adviser, are obviously key to our intelligence
community's response to developments, and it is important that the joint committee has the ability to consult those
particular officers and inform its deliberations. These amendments are quite modest and process based, but they
are very important.
In wrapping up, I just want to go back to some of the points that I made earlier in my speech. There is not one
person in this parliament who disputes that one of our most important roles is to protect the safety of our people,
but equally—and perhaps this reflects my background as a lawyer—I would place a very high premium on
protecting the human rights and civil liberties of Australian citizens. Fortunately, in recent years we have not seen
many examples of the abuse of these kinds of powers by our intelligence agencies, but it is important to make sure
that our parliament does retain a bit of a check and balance on the actions of agencies that have such far-reaching
and intrusive powers into our community. Perhaps it is a function of growing up as a child in Queensland in the
Bjelke-Petersen era, when the Queensland government of the day had the Special Branch of the police force,
which was essentially operating as a secret police service, spying on Queensland citizens, preparing files on them
and conducting extremely intrusive investigations into Queensland citizens for no reason other than their political
beliefs.
So it is vital that, if we are going to enhance the powers of our intelligence agencies in order to protect our
safety, in parallel we have a responsibility to the Australian people to also enhance the powers of this parliament
to oversight the actions of those intelligence communities. Australians—not just me but Australians generally, I
think—place a very high premium on their freedoms and their human rights. They expect them to be protected,
and it is incumbent upon us as members of parliament to make sure that those protections remain in place and are
strengthened as the legislation which provides powers to our intelligence communities also expands. I think it is
through that combination—the combination of providing our intelligence agencies with the powers that they need
and also providing Australians with protections from the abuse of those kinds of powers—that we strike the right
balance to protect Australians well into the future and make sure that all Australians remain safe from these
terrible terrorist attacks that are becoming all too common right across the world.
Senator HUME (Victoria) (11:40): I rise today to speak on the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence
and Security Amendment Bill, the PJCIS Amendment Bill 2015. This is a bill that proposes significant changes to
the Intelligence Services Act 2001, the ISA. Firstly, it proposes to change the composition of the PJCIS. Secondly,
this bill proposes to expand the powers and functions of the PJCIS by allowing the PJCIS to conduct a review into
operational activities of the Australian intelligence agencies and the Australian Federal Police. It proposes to
expand the powers and functions of the PJCIS by authorising the Independent National Security Legislation
Monitor, the INSLM, to provide the PJCIS with a copy of any report on a matter referred to it by the PJCIS and
requiring the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security, the IGIS, to give the PJCIS a copy of any report
provided to the Prime Minister or the minister within three months. The bill proposes allowing the PJCIS to
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