Senator MacGIBBON(8.11 p.m.) —Yesterday the report to the Australian parliament of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation was tabled. Because of the self-imposed embargo—I am speaking about members of the government—I wish to take a few moments of the Senate's time tonight in the adjournment debate to refer to it.

At the outset, as the presiding member—in legal terms—of the Joint Standing Committee on the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, I would like to thank the current Director-General, Mr Dennis Richardson, for his cooperation with the parliamentary committee through the year, which has been very much appreciated.

The report records a successful year's operations by the organisation, an organisation which now does play a very important role within the Australian community. There are changed community attitudes now to intelligence agencies. There is a more maturer climate within the Australian community today than existed 20 or 30 years ago when there was some degree of polarisation with respect to their existence.

I think the Australian community generally recognises now that there is a need for timely and high grade intelligence in relation to a lot of matters both within and outside of Australia. The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation covers the matter of internal espionage within Australia. Their great test will come in a few years time with the Olympics. That will be a test of how good their intelligence gathering is and the interception of terrorist groups and other disruptive activities in what will be one of the biggest international activities we have ever mounted in this country.

I note in the report that there has been a reduction of 30 per cent in the staff of ASIO since 1991. That has been, more or less, a progressive reduction over the years. That in itself does not provide grounds for alarm because there have been considerable efficiencies made in the operation of the organisation, but it does mean that we have to watch the capability of the organisation to see that they can fulfil the role that we want from them.

I mentioned before that society's attitudes have changed towards intelligence agencies. One of the important ways they have changed is with respect to accountability. That accountability has to be mediated through the parliament. The parliamentary ASIO committee only covers one agency—that is, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation. I have to say that it is an ineffectual committee with respect to accountability. The act which set up the parliamentary committee was amended in 1987. Section 91(4) of the ASIO Act says:

The functions of the Committee do not include:

(a)    reviewing a matter that relates to the obtaining or communicating by the Organisation of foreign intelligence;

(b)    reviewing an aspect of the activities of the Organisation that does not affect any person who is an Australian citizen or a permanent resident;

(c)    reviewing a matter, including a matter that relates to intelligence collection methods or sources of information, that is operationally sensitive; or

(d)    originating inquiries into individual complaints concerning the activities of the Organisation.

Very simply, that means we cannot deal with anything relating to foreign intelligence. We cannot deal with anything relating to complaints by the community or individual complaints about the activities of the organisation. When you add to that the requirement that we cannot look at any operational matters, there is really very little the committee can do and I do not believe it fulfils the requirement of public accountability.

There are procedures that can be put in place to provide adequate parliamentary oversight and, as a member of committees now for quite some while in this parliament, I would be the first to concede that oversight of an intelligence agency requires different approaches and different procedures, for very obvious reasons, to the oversight we apply to the Department of Defence, the Department of Social Security or anything like that. Having said that, there are procedures that can be followed which do give adequate parliamentary oversight of the intelligence agencies without compromising their operational security, the safety of any of their operatives or the safety of any of the intelligence they gathered, and I think it is time that we moved towards that.

It is true that the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security has a vital role within the oversight regime, but his role basically is to see that laws are not broken, and it really does not go much further than that. But if we had a parliamentary committee that had effective oversight, then I think we would have a safety valve in some way; we would avoid or tend to minimise the incidents that we had some years ago when some disaffected members of ASIS, one of the other organisations, went public, and I believe this is a matter that must be addressed.

The other matter in relation to the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation that I want to bring up is the matter of archival records. In general, archival records are covered by the 30-year rule for government departments. After 30 years, under a freedom of information request, they can be released. Of course, everyone in the chamber today would know that the cabinet papers of 1967, the year of Harold Holt's disappearance, were released today, and that is why there is no-one in the gallery tonight, because there is a great deal of interesting information there that came out.

The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation started as an act of the Labor government in 1949 and one could presume that its records deal with the 1940s, and some even back to the 1930s or earlier. The point I would make is that if you go back 30 years from 1997 you get back to 1967, and the release of information from ASIO is in no way comparable with the release of cabinet information from that time. There would be no greater defender of the right of the agencies to maintain their operational competence by maintaining what is a requisite degree of secrecy than me. Quite obviously, methods used may well still be in use today, and at this time it may not be in the public interest to release details of how information was collected. At the same time, there would be people living—quite a large number of people—who were informers or were mentioned in an adverse way in that era.

I think that, without compromising those matters, more information could be revealed about the early years. I am talking about a period relating to the 1940s and the 1950s. Again I recognise that this is no simple matter. It is very different for the Department of Social Security or somewhere like that where you just open the filing cabinet and pull documents out. Any access to ASIO records is very manpower intensive and therefore costly for the agency, and the agency does bear a big cost in meeting freedom of information requests at the present time.

But the period I am talking about now goes back 50 years to the 1940s and the 1950s. There is a great deal of information that has been released internationally: the VENONA files are a great mine of information of activities relating to the Soviet Union at the time. We have had the opening up of a great deal of Soviet based information since the ending of the Cold War, and of course there has been a spate of information come out from Eastern Europe.

There are legitimate demands by historians because there is a great deal of interest about what was going on in Australia in that period immediately after the Second World War and through the 1950s. That is witnessed by the number of articles that are appearing now about people like Burton, Milner and Clayton. I believe that it is possible to make more information available for legitimate historical purposes because there are a large number of people who lived through that era who are interested. That period of the 1940s and 1950s was an era of great importance for us, particularly with respect to our international relations. Commensurate with maintaining the integrity of operational effectiveness and the rights of individuals who may have been named at that period, there is a legitimate argument to be made for the release of more ASIO information on what is now becoming a matter of some considerable historical interest.