Crimes and Other Legislation Amendment (Omnibus No. 1) Bill 2026

Senator McKIM (Tasmania—Australian Greens Whip) (12:58): I thank the minister for the response and take some of the points that she has made on board. But I do want to offer just a quick couple of responses to the minister's response. Firstly, to be clear, we're not suggesting that the government is targeting people who personally use drugs.

The assertion that I believe I made in my previous contribution was that the impact of these changes will fall more strongly on people at the bottom of an organisation than it will people at the top. I made the point that people at the bottom of an organisation often do have a drug addiction or are from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. Again, I'm not suggesting that you're targeting the personal use of drugs here.

I do understand that the Commonwealth has responsibility, compared with states and territories. Nevertheless, the point remains that this is going to catch and disadvantage drug mules, drug runners, people at the bottom of the supply chains—people who are more likely to be carrying a low-purity product—and people who, let's face it, make up the majority of legal aid's Commonwealth drug clients.

The burden will fall disproportionately less on the organisers and the profiteers at the top of those operations. Also, to respond to the minister's point about the assertion that people are using cutting agents to get under a particular threshold, I'd ask why they don't just carry a quantity that's under the threshold. Why do they need to use a cutting agent to get it under the threshold?

If you wanted to smuggle drugs and you wanted to have a quantity of drugs under a particular threshold, why would you cut it with a cutting agent and bulk it up and make it harder to conceal? I don't really understand the argument that's being put there. It's quite possible that, in attempting to cast my mind into the mind of someone who's smuggling drugs, I might have missed an obvious response to that!

But that was my first response. I also understand that people in compliance operations work hard, but I want to place on the record that we don't think that reducing someone's workload is a reasonable reason to propose changes such as this. The last response I wanted to make was the obvious observation—which was stated, I might add, by the minister; I guess it's a concurrence—that pleas in mitigation are in relation to sentencing.

They're not in relation to the way trials might be conducted, and the points I made were in relation to the defence of an honest and reasonable mistake of fact, and that's a matter that is at least considered in a trial. I think Senator Cash has— Senator Cash: I'm happy for you to keep going if you want. Senator McKIM: Okay.

While I'm on my feet—and I do thank the minister for the response on those matters—I'll go to the surveillance warrant sunset extension; obviously this is an omnibus bill that contains a range of measures. I will take this opportunity to place on the record something I've spoken about repeatedly in my time in the Senate, and that's the erosion of fundamental rights and freedoms in this country over a long period and the role the security apparatus and the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security play in that.

What happens and what has happened repeatedly—and, unfortunately, I believe will continue to happen into the future—is that, whichever of the Labor or the coalition parties are in government, the security apparatus forms a view that they want more power to surveil people. They want more power to control people's lives. We're very close to living in a panopticon at the moment, even though most people remain unaware of that fact.

After they form a view that they want more powers to surveil and to control people's lives, they go to the government and ask for those powers, and the government rolls over. We've seen that repeatedly, whether it be a Labor or a coalition government. They basically bring a bill that effectively delivers the increase in powers to surveil and control.

In this case, we are talking about surveillance. Then it goes into the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, which obviously is designed to specifically exclude the crossbench—with the one notable exception of the member for Clark, which was formerly Denison, in my home state of Tasmania when Mr Wilkie was in the balance of power a few parliaments ago.

He was, as part of negotiations, permitted to enter through the normally closed doors of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security. But apart from that—and I do stand to be corrected here—I'm certainly not aware of any other crossbench member who's ever been invited into the inner sanctum there. Anyway, what happens inside that room is generally that, once the government has proposed legislation, that committee will rasp off a few of the absolute roughest edges but make very few, if any, recommendations for material changes, and the legislation will come through this parliament and then it will get smashed through by the votes of the Labor Party, along with their partners—in terms of being parties of government—in the coalition, and so it goes.

The losers are the Australian people and the fundamental rights and freedoms that so many Australians fought and died to protect through our history. This is happening not just here, by the way. A version of the same thing happens in state and territory governments, and we find ourselves with no fundamental protections in this country.

We have no bill of rights in this country and no provisions in our Constitution that enshrine protections for ordinary, everyday people against this creeping invasion into their privacy by the state. That's the context, and I well remember trying, when I held the justice portfolio for the Australian Greens, to get the numbers in this place for an inquiry into a bill of rights—just an inquiry into a bill of rights.

This is when the Labor Party had in its platform support for a bill of rights. I don't know if it's still there, but it was back in the day. Mr Dreyfus was the shadow attorney-general at that stage.

Could the Greens get the Labor Party's support simply for an inquiry into whether or not Australia should have a bill of rights? No, we couldn't. We couldn't even get the Labor Party to support an inquiry into a bill or charter of rights in this place, what form a bill or charter of rights might take, and what matters could and ought to be enshrined in a bill or charter of rights.

So the people of Australia have very little defence against this creeping erosion of their privacy and their freedom, and it is an indictment of the parties of government and, in fact, this parliament as a whole that those erosions continue apace. This legislation is yet another step down that path.