Senator ROBERT RAY (6:37 PM) —by leave—This report, entitled A watching brief: the nature, scope and appropriateness of ASIO's public reporting activities, was tabled by Senator Calvert some weeks ago. I would like to start by thanking the staff of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Joint Statutory Committee for the work that they put into this report. I would also like to thank all of the witnesses who came along and gave evidence. I would like to pay tribute to Mr David Jull, who chairs that committee with the sort of alacrity you would expect from such an experienced parliamentarian. This was an inquiry into the nature, scope and appropriateness of ASIO's public reporting activities. Any body such as ASIO will always engender a degree of paranoia, but the attitude of the Australian public to ASIO today compared to, let us say, 30 years ago has changed enormously—and that is a credit to ASIO. It is now an organisation that operates strictly within the confines of the directions of legislation and government. It is an organisation that is ethically based and it is an organisation that is very effective.

One of the great nightmares for ASIO was surely the Olympic Games. It had to play a major security role in the Olympic Games. I know, from both my public knowledge and any private knowledge from any sources that I have, that there was not an incident to do with this Olympic Games. That is a tribute to ASIO and it is also a tribute to the activities of the New South Wales government and the Commonwealth, and to the cooperation shown in this particular area. On the last Saturday morning of the Olympics, I was thinking only one thing above all else: one day to go to having a secure games. Sure, I was thinking about a lot of other things to do with the Olympics, but that alone was the most crucial ingredient in the Olympic Games—to have a secure and incident free Olympics. So congratulations to all the governments concerned and to all the agencies involved in procuring that result.

There are two major ways in which ASIO reports to the Australian public. One is by its annual report, which is tabled in this parliament every year. The other is through the web site that was recently set up, which puts out a whole range of information that can be accessed by those who are computer literate. I, of course, concentrate on the written annual report on most occasions. I think one of the ways of assessing whether ASIO's annual report is adequate enough is to do the international comparisons. This the committee did. We compared ASIO's annual report with those of like-minded agencies around the world and, for the most part, we found it as transparent as the reports of nearly all of those agencies. It must be very encouraging for those who still harbour some doubts about having `a spy organisation' that it is so transparent and that it transmits such a degree of information to the public. Its web site is new and an innovation. It has been going for less than 12 months, but the amount of hits on the web site shows that it is being accessed by a whole range of people. We have made some recommendations to improve this, especially in terms of multilingual access.

But the really crucial issue is how much is in the declassified report that you all read in this chamber and how much is in the classified report that goes to executive government. Very generously, ASIO and the Attorney-General agreed to Mr Jull as chairman and me as probably the senior opposition member of the committee comparing the two reports. It was a recent report, too. Our request was to compare a fairly old classified report with the declassified report, but the Attorney-General and ASIO thought it would be much more relevant for us to compare a fairly recent report. Mr Jull and I went through the classified report, line by line, and compared it with the declassified report. I would have to say that every judgment exercised by Mr Williams and ASIO was correct. I could see the reason for every deletion from the declassified report and I could be in agreeance with why it was not in the declassified report. That was very reassuring to me.

I had the opportunity in government for six years, as a member of the National Security Committee, to make those comparisons then. I cannot say that I ever did it as rigorously as I did it on the more recent occasion, but having done so I can say to colleagues here with absolute confidence that nothing is contained in the classified report and then deleted from the declassified report that should not have been deleted. That is very reassuring. I think it is the best benchmark you can put on ASIO, to have a couple of people from outside go through the reports line by line and make that particular judgment.

A side issue did come up, and that was the 30-year rule. Most ASIO documents are covered by the 30-year rule, as are most government documents. But some historians have complained about lack of access. Also, I think they have postulated that it is post-Cold War and so access should be given. But you have to go back to the basic point that informants—and none of us particularly like informants—putting information into ASIO were given the guarantee of protection. The one recommendation we do make here is that at least the list of files should be made more readily available to historians and to members of the public so that, when they need access and they are entitled to be granted access, that can occur. But, on the whole, I do not think that we would have agreed with scrapping the 30-year rule.

On a final point, we have made seven or eight recommendations here, none of which are terribly radical and none of which are terribly dramatic. We think they would simply add to the transparency of ASIO and would mean that the public could access information in a much easier way. I do recommend that those who have an interest in security matters read our report. I hope the government will, at some stage, come back with a response. I do not think that there is anything in this report that would at all embarrass the Attorney-General. It is good to know that, having put the microscope over ASIO, it has polished up remarkably well.

Question resolved in the affirmative.