Mr TUCKEY (12:06 PM) —In the time allocated to me today I wish to address in due course all of the purposes of the Anti-Terrorism Bill (No. 2) 2005, as listed in the explanatory memorandum. But, having just listened to the Leader of the Opposition’s address—and whilst welcoming the support he has indicated—I could not but have a bit of a wry smile when a couple of hoary old Labor Party trade union chestnuts were rolled out in the interest of community security. We have revisited cabotage. Where the vessel is unseaworthy and it sinks, it is not going to blow up. So the Leader of the Opposition took some care to draw to the chamber’s attention the fact—

Mr Gavan O’Connor interjecting—

Mr TUCKEY —I keep giving you advice about that. The member for Corio does not have to worry about the next election; he is not contesting it. But there might be others here who would like to win, and they might just consider some of these issues. The point made on cabotage was that we have to have good, honest Aussies on board the boat to make sure it does not blow up. We have seen what happened at our airports recently with good union members, about whom there are now some questions going to the security risks they may have raised. The only condition to getting on an Australian flagged ship I know of is that you have to be a trade union member. The people who make the decisions as to who gets the jobs do not seem to have been very concerned about community security in the back. Let me tell you something that is absolutely true: the Carr government in New South Wales had legislation preventing airport authorities having an adequate video surveillance system. Why? They had that because it might have caught one of the union members just helping themselves to a camel suit or to other valuables. Do not worry about the security!

For goodness sake, in what is a very serious debate, do not start trotting out the old hoary chestnuts, including, of course, the coastguard. I am all in favour of maximising security. Having been a fisheries minister, I have a fair idea of the problems identified. But it is about time the Labor Party told us just how many ships they intend to commission. Is it going to be one per 100 kilometres? It is a pretty good sort of vessel that does, say, 30 knots. How many do you need around the 8,000 kilometres of northern coastline to make sure you can guarantee that there is no access for these tiny little fishing boats that come down from all over the place? Is the coastguard going to continue to provide the sort of aerial surveillance we have at the moment? As a practical measure, I have drawn to the attention of my party propositions to have in the air 20 aircraft for the cost of one. They, by the way, will be unmanned vehicles. Maybe the trade union movement and the pilots association will want to have a grizzle about that.

The realities are that you first have to identify the vessels and then you have to have enough surface equipment to get to them before, having seen the aerial surveillance, they buzz off. These are the factors. A coastguard per se is a name. It is time we were told how many naval assets are going to be transferred over and whether the people at Stirling base in the electorate of the Leader of the Opposition are all going to be told to transfer over to the coastguard or otherwise be made redundant. Cripes! They might be the first people wanting to use this new legislation. The reality is that they are silly propositions.

While I talk about that and I look at the proposed amendments and criticism, I should say that a fundamental of the Wheeler report was to make it clear that the level of government intervention must be relevant to the risk assessment. In other words, if the risk assessment is low, you do not X-ray 90 per cent of containers. This can be partly established through the fact that you know the source of these containers; people are able to make decisions as to the risk of each container. Of course, these are things you do. Even an expert of Sir John Wheeler’s standing is able to say to us, ‘You don’t have to have 100 per cent of everything.’ The simple fact is that you address a risk assessment as part of the process. I have in my electorate a couple of small regional airports. One of them, I think, would not be very attractive to a terrorist because it is a hell of a long way away from the Asian region et cetera. We have made grants to that airport of a couple of hundred thousand dollars to improve fencing and give them what the risk assessment says is adequate.

The Leader of the Opposition also sought to eulogise the Chief Minister of the ACT, Mr Stanhope. I thought it was outrageous that a person who had been brought in and given full coverage of work in progress and who had every opportunity, using the legal facilities available to him and his government, to bring to the attention of the federal government—as other premiers were doing in confidence—whatever his concerns were, did what he did. I think it was Premier Beattie who expressed some considerable dissatisfaction that evidence he had brought to the attention of another of his Labor leader colleagues had been released to the media. He knew the rules. He knew the process. One can only wonder whether that also was Mr Stanhope, who just wanted a bit of publicity. It was a work in progress. Why did he have that bill? He had it at the invitation of the government, to try and make it better and more reasonable. Of course, when you instruct those who draft the bills that you have some serious problems, they will in the first instance write the bill to be as tough as possible. That is their job. You should not for a little bit of political advantage take them apart for the advice they gave to the government. That is exactly what it is.

On the issue of illegal fishing, which came into this terrorist debate, might I remind the House that I was the minister who had to fight quite hard to catch a boat called the South Tomi. It had never been done before. A past member of the Labor Party with whom I did not have much contact had the courage and the decency to stop me in the passageway and congratulate me on that effort. It has been done since. I can advise the House that arranging the bureaucratic assets was not easy, but when you have determination you get there. That is the difference. We have the determination.

We have just heard the Leader of the Opposition tell us that if it was not for the Labor Party, there would have been no adjustments to this bill. There are some very well-intentioned and capable people on the government back benches—I would name Senator Brandis and the member for Wentworth, who sits alongside me, and there are others—highly qualified people, whom, as other members of the party room present in this chamber at the moment can attest, from the very first day that we were asked to give as a party room support for this process, were on their feet ensuring that the final outcome was in good order. The member for Kooyong, I am sure, was one of those at the time and no doubt will have something to say about that.

Of course it is difficult legislation. Of course we are going well beyond the measures and the legislation that we once would have considered appropriate. We have just had to do that. There was the silly argument that we tried to hide this activity on Melbourne Cup day. I am strongly in favour for personal reasons that we do not sit on Melbourne Cup day, but to then say that it is some conspiracy and that we waited for Melbourne Cup day to do some despicable act is just silly. It is not necessary. The fact was, as a recent events have established beyond doubt, we needed to do something in a hurry. The opposition were fully briefed. It was a silly thing to say. This is terribly serious stuff. Many of the things the Leader of the Opposition wanted to say and did say bring him credit. But the opposition can never avoid the opportunity to throw in a couple of scare tactics that have nothing to do with the issue.

Having said those things in response to the words said already, let me outline the bill to the House, as per the advice of the drafters in the explanatory memorandum:

In the environment in which we live, that sounds like a pretty powerful reason to support this legislation. The principal features of the bill are:

Of course, that is a necessary starting point. A preventative approach is everything. We do not just want to improve the powers of our police to go out and find the people who blew up a train yesterday. We need to prevent that event occurring. The explanatory memorandum continues:

That is a very unusual measure; it is something not generally practised in law but being made legal by this legislation, considering the very serious issues that confront us as politicians today. It continues:

The old idea that a person who burgled someone’s house and was let out on bail in the hope they would not burgle another house the next night was not very effective, but nobody’s life is at risk. But suddenly you have people who are prepared to destroy their own life just to kill another 50 or 60 people they have never seen in their life before. If you have a reasonable suspicion of that, do you let them out again? No, not until such time as you can establish in your mind as a police agency that these people do not represent that risk. The EM continues:

This is clearly of great value. The explanatory memorandum goes on:

I think that, administratively, our government does have a responsibility to do more in that area. We have been criticised internationally. Of course, every time we take those steps, our banking and other financial institutions create headlines in the paper, saying, ‘This will cost hundreds of millions of dollars at the cost of our customers and shareholders.’ As with the Wheeler recommendations, there has to be some sort of risk assessment there, but I would support the comments of the Leader of the Opposition with regard to improvement in that area. Some of it is occurring in this legislation, but administratively we must do it. It goes on:

As I said, we have had to pass laws in this House simply to get adequate video surveillance in the baggage handling and other areas of our airports. If ever a state government stands condemned it was the Carr government, who thought it was more important to give privacy to people in a workplace than to protect the security of the passengers in an aircraft. The explanatory memorandum continues:

When the circumstances are so terrible, you have to have the power to make people answer questions. The other side of that is that sometimes there is a willing person who wishes to assist the police but they are simply terrified to be portrayed as a volunteer and they need protection to be able to say, ‘Of course I answered; I answered because I was going to be punished if I didn’t.’ So it is a two-way street. We are now dealing with a situation where those requirements and those powers are necessary. The list goes on:

Again, it is absolutely important. At the conclusion of this legislation it will be a major crime to tell a lie. If that line is, ‘I don’t know where the explosives are hidden, even though I dug the hole,’ of course, it should be punishable to the maximum. It continues:

In other words, this is the legal right to know who is on a plane when you suspect certain parties have been there for ill intent, an absolutely necessary requirement considering recent events and the threat that is now posed by terrorism. It continues:

We have to make sure that this is done and properly monitored, because state governments had to comply with union instructions. And finally:

The history of terrorism has always been about the laundering and the transfer of money. Every attempt that we can make to ensure that that does not happen in the future is to be encouraged and, again, this so-called controversial legislation deals with those matters. For all the hoo-ha, they are the provisions of this legislation. That is what the explanatory memorandum advises this House. I do not see that any of that could be avoided, and I do not see that any of it should be criticised. We need to get on with it in the interests of protecting Australians and the lifestyle we have enjoyed for so many years.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER (Mr Lindsay)—Before I call the next speaker, I advise the House that one of our longstanding, hardworking officers is having a birthday today. On behalf of the House, I wish our Serjeant-at-Arms a very happy 50th birthday.