Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2025
Ms ALDRED (Monash) (18:35): I associate myself with the remarks of my colleague, the member for New England, on the insidious rise of the illegal tobacco trade at the moment. It is causing huge issues for regional Australia, particularly in my home state of Victoria, where that was brought home just this week, with the illegal ram raid on a local grocery store in Longwarry.
They're good businesspeople; they care about their staff. They had a ransom note from one of these characters. They didn't pay the ransom.
They did all of the right things. They went to the police. Yet, a couple of days later, they had a ram raid attack on their business, which is totally unacceptable.
So we really need to deal very, very strongly with that in a number of ways. The Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2025 amends the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979, Surveillance Devices Act 2004 and Crimes Act 1914 to make critical provisions operate as they are intended to. It also provides technical amendments flowing from the government's decision to reconstitute the Home Affairs portfolio after this year's federal election.
Schedule 1 of the bill deals with the permitting of protected network activity and how warrants for intercepts of information are to be used, communicated and recorded to meet disclosure obligations. Schedule 2 amends the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979 to transfer the statutory function of the Communications Access Coordinator, the CAC, from the Secretary of the Attorney-General's Department to the Department of Home Affairs.
We're at this juncture because the Labor government decided, after the federal election in 2022, that it would pull apart the Department of Home Affairs. This blatantly prioritised party political mechanics above the Australian national interest. We know that, following the 2025 election, the Albanese Labor government was dragged into putting the Home Affairs portfolio back together again in its original structure, which was put forward by the coalition.
That included returning the Australian Federal Police, the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission and the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre to Home Affairs from the Attorney-General's portfolio. The coalition was open and upfront about its commitment to this structure before the election. The Labor Party was nowhere to be seen on getting its act together on this front.
At the time, the Prime Minister was quoted in the Canberra Times as saying: … the move came after challenges with information sharing … 'Challenges with information sharing' must be the understatement of the year in this case. The change was the third round of changes, by the way, that this government fiddled around with in three years as part of their machinery-of-government changes.
This was, of course, after the events in January, when there was an initial discovery of a caravan full of explosives. Schedule 3 will amend the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979 to permit limited access to stored communications and allow agencies to undertake development and testing activities in circumstances where they would, in other circumstances, be allowed to intercept the same communication if it were continuing to pass over a telecommunications system.
The intention of these changes will be to firm up the existing framework and ensure it is able to keep pace with a continually developing and modern operating environment. Schedule 4 corrects a technical issue with the operation of the interception— Mr Hill interjecting— Ms ALDRED: No, I'm not—of international production orders in the T(IA) Act that was preventing international production orders from being given to US based prescribed communications providers in certain circumstances.
This is dealt with under an agreement between the government of Australia and the government of the United States of America on access to electronic data for the purpose of countering serious crime. I go back to my remarks about the illegal tobacco trade in Australia. While official figures show that smoking rates are declining, wastewater reports from criminal intelligence agencies show that smoking as recorded in wastewater is actually at an eight-year high.
Legal retailers of legal cigarettes are reporting, I think, 50 per cent down on the last 12 months and 30 per cent on the year before that. So we have a major problem with criminal gangs. That is absolutely relatable to some of the points in this bill.
What these amendments do is clarify that interception orders issued to Australian law enforcement and national security agencies may be used to obtain prospective content data from communications providers in a country with which Australia has a designated international agreement regardless of the type of technical method by which that prospective data is sent on.
I've had a bit to say about data management recently, particularly around issues pertaining to data sovereignty. I think it's really important that we have regard for the management and security of data kept here and abroad where it concerns sensitive consumer data, such as financial records or health records, or where we're dealing with the areas of national security and our Defence Force agencies.
The amendments clarify that interception orders issued to Australian law enforcement and national security agencies may be used to obtain prospective content data from communications providers in a country with which Australia has a designated international agreement regardless of the technical method by which that prospective data is sent to an agency. Schedule 5 amends the Crimes Act 1914 to clarify the threshold for authorising and varying controlled operations and the circumstances in which a participant is protected from criminal responsibility and indemnified against civil liability.
The anonymous nature of online crime means law enforcement may lack information to assess potential risks when deciding whether to authorise or vary a controlled operation. The amendments will clarify that the authorising officers must consider the direct and reasonably foreseeable consequences of controlled conduct when authorising or varying a controlled operation.
Schedule 5 also provides clarity around legal protections for officers involved in undercover operations targeted at taking down insidious sexual abuse syndicates. In the 2024-25 financial year, the ACCCE Child Protection Triage Unit received 82,764 reports of online child sexual exploitation. This equates to an average of 226 reports per day.
The need for strong action against these predators has never been more acute. These amendments ensure the law is fit for purpose in addressing the most abhorrent online crimes where persons under investigation are anonymised, including on the dark web and encrypted communications platforms. The changes in the Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2025 provide essential clarifications to ensure that the agencies that keep our nation safe can continue to do so in an era of rapid technological development.
The coalition will always support sensible reforms which ensure men and women serving in intelligence and law enforcement roles have the tools they need to take down criminals, no matter where they are hiding, and the coalition will be supporting this bill without amendment.