It Would Be Really Good To See Some Movement On This And Some Related Areas!

This appeared last week:

Opportunity to ‘undo’ raft of surveillance powers passed by Coalition

Denham Sadler
National Affairs Editor

2 June 2022

The restructuring of the Home Affairs Department by the new Labor government and the ongoing review of surveillance powers offers an opportunity to “undo” many of the privacy-invasive digital-focused laws passed during the Coalition’s time in power, Deakin University senior lecturer Dr Monique Mann says.

Labor this week unveiled its Administrative Arrangements Order, revealing that responsibility for the Australian Federal Police (AFP) from the Department of Home Affairs to the Attorney-General’s Department.

This comes five years after former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull moved the AFP into the new Home Affairs super-portfolio.

The new order “transfers responsibility for criminal justice, law enforcement policy and operations, and protective services from the Home Affairs portfolio to the Attorney-General’s portfolio”.

Clare O’Neill has been appointed as the new Minister for Home Affairs and Cyber Security.

The former Coalition government passed a number of digital surveillance laws during its recent time in government through Home Affairs, handing significant new powers to the AFP and other agencies. These included the mandatory metadata retention laws, encryption-busting powers and the Identify and Disrupt Act.

While in Opposition, Labor offered support to all of these pieces of legislation, which the Coalition argued were about national security.

This transfer of power away from Home Affairs, along with the ongoing review into Australia’s surveillance laws, presents a significant opportunity to unwind some of these digital law enforcement powers, Dr Mann said.

“Home Affairs as a super agency under [former minister Peter] Dutton in particular was a terrible bureaucratic structure in relation to having all of these agencies in this super department, with some concerning issues in relation to independence. It’s good that’s starting to perhaps be wound back, but what that looks like and how it operates in practice we don’t know,” Dr Mann told InnovationAus.com.

“This is an opportunity to potentially undo all the things passed under the Liberal government, but I’m also a bit reticent that there will be any substantive change because all these laws were passed with bipartisan support from Labor.

“The broader reform process underway is an opportunity to undo or reconsider the legal framework governing the exercise of surveillance powers in this country. This is a viable opportunity to make changes and I’ll be interested to see the extent to which Labor diverts from their predecessors and starts making meaningful reform that protects the rights of citizens as opposed to the empty arguments in relation to national security.”

More here:

https://www.innovationaus.com/opportunity-to-undo-raft-of-surveillance-powers-passed-by-coalition/

If this review was to get more balance in these powers to watch and intrude I reckon it would be a very good thing. Police always want more powers in this area and can always find some example where they could help them – often to the detriment of a citizen who may or may not be finally found to have acted criminally. Then what would regularly  happen is that an over the top law would be proposed to ‘fix’ the problem and if the Opposition resisted they were labelled as ‘soft on crime’ and would roll over – while all the time bleating they were not happy – but not having the guts to actually refuse to pass the proposed law!

We saw mumberless examples over the last 9 years on laws relating to terrorism, drug suppression and so on. Interestingly we saw few prosecutions and a number of times the laws were found to be invalid when tested.

While moving these laws into a better balance between freedom from surveillance and proper monitoring it might also be a good idea the ensure the modernised Privacy laws are also made fit for purpose and that individuals have better protection against privacy breaches and abuse of personal information. Better funding for the Privacy Commissioner would also not go astray I believe.

Overall I reckon we have been sold out in terms of our individual rights and privacy and some shift of the balance back to protection of individual rights may be a very good thing! We could also do with clarity and national consistency of our health information privacy laws!

A good first step might be to outlaw any form of secret trials – to ensure equal access to justice. I find this sort of power pretty troubling….

You can read about current an example case here:

Collaery Trial Date Set: Federal Government Continues to Prosecute Whistleblowers

https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=5f803709-f303-471b-b7fa-2e0a655df0e6

It does seem the new Attorney- General is reviewing all this – thank heavens.

See here:

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=bernard+collaery

I, for one, think that a national Human Rights Law would probably be a good thing to clarify privacy and surveillance protections among other issues.

What do you think?

David.