Senator BARTLETT (10:50 PM) —by leave—I move Democrat amendments (2) to (4) together:

Amendments (2) to (4) deal with schedule 1, item 7. Whilst I am putting that one lower—Senator Brown suggested removing that schedule altogether; it may have been better to do them the other way around—it deals with the aspect of the bill to do with detention. This is one of the significant aspects of the legislation that I think, among many others, has not had a lot of attention and a lot of people would not be aware of what it does. Basically, it empowers any officer who knows or who reasonably suspects that a person is in an excised offshore place and that person is an unlawful non-citizen to detain that person.

This gives power to a wide range of people to be able to detain a person. The Democrats believe that, at least in terms of the way we read the bill, there is no time limit on that length of detention. Whilst we have apprehensions about being able to detain at all, we think there should at least be some limitation on the time period of the detention. I think we could point to current circumstances. The people off Ashmore Reef have been there for a fair while now—I am not sure of the precise length of time—and they are quite clearly being restrained there. It would certainly be arguable before a court that they are being detained. That sort of thing should not be allowed to occur indefinitely. In the current situation it is occurring indefinitely and the Democrats believe there should be some sort of time limit. If officers are going to have the power to detain, these amendments state there should be some time limit on that period of detention.

Just to be clear about this power, under the act, `officer' can mean an enormous number of people. It can mean an officer of the department, an officer for the purposes of the Customs Act, a protective services officer for the purposes of the Australian Protective Services Act, a member of the Australian Federal Police or of the police force of a state or an internal territory or a member of the police force of an external territory, or any other person authorised by the minister by notice published in the Gazette or a member of the Australian Defence Force under subsection 5 of this part. That is my reading of the number of people who can be classed as being an officer. So a fair few people will have this power. In our view that power should be limited in some way by a time limit, and that is the rationale behind these amendments.