Mr KERR (6:12 PM) —I find this an extraordinary argument. We are told that there are hundreds of millions of postal items coming in and out of the country, yet how many thousands of millions of telephone conversations occur daily throughout this country, and do we allow law enforcement officers who have a reasonable belief that one of those phone calls requires interception to make up their own minds to listen to it? We do not. We require a process supervised by yourself, in the case of ASIO, and by a judge or a member of the AAT in relation to law enforcement. What you propose now is to strip away the only protection, which is a requirement—it is not a particularly strong protection, I might say; it is not a pre-approval clearance—that there be present when a piece of mail is opened somebody else external to Customs. You will take that away and say it is a proper respect for the balance. I think that is an absolutely stupid position. You say, `They'll only act on reasonable belief.' Who is to vet that? No-one in your system—not a single sausage. There is no obligation to have, for example, a camera to watch and to verify that there was a sniffer dog or some objective test to pull out a piece of post. There is nothing like that. So there you are: you have got your dog, you have got your X-ray machine, but you see a nice piece of juicy mail coming from a nice celebrity of the day—shall we say Kerry Packer?—and somebody decides it might be fun to have a look at it. Who is going to check on that? Who is going to check if it is their girlfriend's post? Who is going to check on all these potential abuses that must happen with hundreds of millions of bits of mail coming through all the time. What the Attorney has said is that there is nobody: what we have to do is trust these fellows.

I do trust most people in law enforcement. I have a great deal of respect for the people who served as members of the Australian Federal Police and the National Crime Authority when I was Minister for Justice. Surprisingly, I believe that most police—even in jurisdictions like NSW—do their best to act honestly at all times. But I would like to know where anybody who can stand before this parliament and suggest that those kinds of uncontrolled exercises of discretion have not been abused over the last 20 years has been. Where have they been? I have to tell you that they could not have been in Australia, because the news reports of this stuff daily give us examples of where people make bad decisions. They breach the obligations that have been placed on them by the community as law enforcement and Customs officials. We should not exaggerate that. The huge majority of people do not act improperly, but we should not close our eyes to the fact that some do so and do so quite frequently. Why would we strip away something that can be not a particular inconvenience? If there is a case where in a particular exchange someone within Australia Post is suspected of being a source of information to organised crime or leaking in relation to these kinds of inspections, let us root them out. Let us investigate them as participants in corrupt conduct. Let us get rid of them. If we do have our eye on them and we suspect them, let us bring in an Australian Federal Police officer who can do the checking instead.

Let us not abandon our civil liberties for the sake of this kind of absolute indifference to the interests of those of us who still have some respect for a citizen's privacy. To say that checking you when you come off the plane to see whether you have some drugs in your suitcase, to say that intercepting personal communications—with the potential of someone reading letters and all the embarrassment and awkwardness if that communication is then used in a circumstance which might give rise to blackmail or all kinds of infringements of our rights—is the same thing, Attorney-General, suggests that you need to get a closer grip on this issue and take it away from your junior minister who has sold you a pup. You are standing up and defending what is absolutely indefensible. There is no public interest that would require us to give away safeguards. We have suggested one method of putting an alternative safeguard in; you have come up with nothing. (Time expired)