Page 4584 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 18 October 2011
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number of them. Again, as you look further into this, the sheer extent of powers available to police and counter-terrorism organisations in Australia becomes clearer. It becomes very clear that preventative detention is so seemingly unnecessary and at the same time so counter to many of the ideas and legal traditions in Australia that it really begs the question as to why we would want to keep it.
The government have outlined a number of arguments against our amendments, both today in the chamber and in conversations I have had with the attorney and with the Justice and Community Safety Directorate. I might say at this point that I do appreciate those conversations we have had with both the attorney and the directorate. It has certainly given us an opportunity to work through the ideas. Whilst ultimately I do not agree with them, I appreciate the spirit in which we had the conversation.
I will touch on a couple of those key arguments as to why these amendments cannot be supported, and I think dispel some of those arguments. One of them is that we need a lower threshold for terrorism in order to be able to act quickly to prevent an offence in a complex and difficult world in which we are under significant pressure to prevent the loss of life. Whilst I agree with that, in all of our discussions and talking about why that lower threshold is more necessary than the standard threshold of a reasonable suspicion by a police officer about an offence being committed, the government has been unable to provide an actual scenario that illustrates why this lower threshold is actually needed.
I have asked for that. I said, “Can you explain to me a situation where, if we remove preventative detention orders, police would not have the power to do what they needed to do?” And I have not been given a single scenario. There is some suggestion that scenarios are classified. I actually do not think that it is such a threat to national security to be able to describe a situation which might identify the holes in the law in such a way that a member of parliament might be able to get a sense of whether we should be supporting these laws or not. So that has been frustrating, and I think it undermines the government’s argument in that a single scenario cannot be illustrated.
The next one is one that the attorney has touched on again today—that the criminal law only provides for 20 hours of investigation, or 24 hours, I think the attorney said in the chamber today. But further examination of the law shows that detention can extend to seven days. I will spend a bit of time on this, because the attorney has clearly put this on the table and I simply disagree with the analysis. Perhaps this is a point of debate that we might be able to resolve.
When a suspect is arrested in the ACT on suspicion of planning to commit a terrorist act, an investigating authority may detain that person for up to seven days for questioning. Under the commonwealth Crimes Act, which applies in the ACT, section 23A(6) provides that the act applies to offences against ACT law. The commonwealth Crimes Act provides for up to 12 hours of questioning and seven days of so-called dead time.
Section 23DB(11) contains a specific power that there may be seven days of dead time. So, in effect, this amounts to seven days of detention for questioning before charges are laid. This is an extended time that only applies to terrorism suspects. This
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