Page 2393 - Week 09 - Thursday, 17 September 1992
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What is damaging in those circumstances is not the fact that the conversation has been recorded or overheard, but the fact that the contents of the conversation are then transmitted to somebody else. My thinking particularly here, of course, is of it being transmitted to the media, where it might be used to titillate the public and provide interest in what ought to be a fully private matter. A number of examples of this have come to our attention over the last few years, and I do not think I need to mention many of them. I will mention only two. One was the conversation by car telephone between a then Federal Opposition Leader and a Premier-elect of Victoria. This conversation was intercepted and it was extensively related in the media, both the electronic media and the print media. Under this legislation that kind of intrusion into privacy, as I understand it, would not occur. That, I think, is appropriate.
The other example, which is much more recent, is the so-called interception of a conversation between a person supposed to be the Princess of Wales and another person. That has caused enormous embarrassment and has caused great media attention in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. Again, this legislation would make those sorts of conversations impossible to play back or to relate on television or in the print media. Madam Speaker, I think that those sorts of provisions are appropriate, providing that they do recognise that there are some very limited uses for listening devices which this community must ensure proceed.
There are some concerns that the Opposition has with this Bill which I hope that the Attorney might address in the course of his remarks. I was puzzled by my reading of paragraph 4(2)(b) of the Bill, which makes an exemption from the provisions of subclause 4(1). Paragraph 4(2)(b) refers to the unintentional hearing of a private conversation by means of a listening device. It occurred to me that "unintentional hearing of a private conversation" could have several meanings. Consider, for example, a person who, with a wireless or a CB radio, intercepts a conversation. Is the initial interception an unintentional hearing of a private conversation? Almost certainly, it is. You do not intend to hear that conversation; you just happen to reach it.
But is a person who sits and listens to the whole of a conversation, which might last for 10 or 15 or 20 minutes, unintentionally listening to a private conversation? Are they unintentionally hearing a private conversation? I think we could argue that the initial interception, the first encounter with the conversation, is certainly unintentional; but listening to the whole of the conversation, the hearing of the whole conversation, it would seem to me, would not be unintentional.
I am not inclined to amend that provision, because I tend to think that the provisions in this Bill which deal with the hearing of a conversation are not, in a sense, so important as the provisions that deal with the transmission of the content of the conversation. That is the more important provision here. In a sense, I am not so concerned about somebody who sits in one room listening over an intercom, for example, to a conversation in another room. That is concerning, but not worthy of enormous legislative action. What is more concerning is the person who then goes away and tells somebody else about what they have heard, or, even more damaging still, tells the media about some aspect of the conversation. That certainly is a matter of concern.
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