Parliament will not vote on the bill to force telcos to store Australians’ metadata until a bipartisan committee reports

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

The Abbott government has agreed to delay a parliamentary vote on mandatory data retention until next year, while digital rights groups warned the scheme would create “enormous honeypots” of sensitive information about millions of Australians.



The government presented a bill to parliament on Thursday that would require Australian telcos and internet service providers to store data about their customers’ activities for two years, but it will not be subject to a vote until after a bipartisan committee completes an inquiry.

The law will allow the storage of internet protocol (IP) addresses assigned to customers and who they emailed, but not their web-browsing history or the content of their emails.

It will allow the storage of details about phone customers’ calls, including the numbers contacted and the time, date, duration.

The communications minister, Malcolm Turnbull, and the attorney general, George Brandis, argued such “metadata” was a crucial investigative tool for law-enforcement agencies, and vowed to negotiate with Labor on the timeframes for the parliamentary joint committee on intelligence and security.

It is understood the government has agreed that the reporting date should be next year, but negotiations on the date are continuing. The government has suggested a three-month inquiry.

Labor’s communications spokesman, Jason Clare, said the bill was “complex and controversial and broader than national security”.

“It involves privacy concerns from everyone that’s got a mobile phone or access to the internet, and potential cost concerns,” he told the ABC.

“Our view is it needs to be subject to serious scrutiny, and we’ve made that point to the government today. We’ve said this shouldn’t be passed through the parliament in the next few weeks, it needs a couple of months of consideration by the parliamentary committee, and the government’s agreed to that.”

The executive officer of Electronic Frontiers Australia, Jon Lawrence, said laws forcing telcos and internet service providers to retain of data of all Australians were “unnecessary and disproportionate”, likening it to “speculative surveillance”.

“We’re not opposed to targeted surveillance,” he said. “We are opposed to indiscriminate society-wide capturing of huge honeypots of valuable data in case it’s needed later.”

Lawrence said it was inevitable that there would be data breaches, whether by hacking or a disgruntled system administrator. “The only secure data is data that doesn’t exist,” he said.

Lawrence also raised concerns about the costs of forcing telcos and internet service providers to store data that they may not have a commercial need to retain. “As taxpayers or consumers, we’re going to pay for it one way or another,” he said.

The Greens senator Scott Ludlam said the government would “impose a surveillance tax on the entire Australian population” and could expect “a very serious campaign” against the plans.

Turnbull said he expected “to make a substantial contribution” to the companies’ implementation and operational costs, but the government did “not have a final figure at this point”.

“We’re asking these companies to do things that they don’t have a business need to do and there is an expense,” he said. “There are ballpark figures being thrown around but they are at this stage not of sufficient accuracy for me to be citing.”

Turnbull said securing the data safely was “the responsibility of the telcos and of course they’re very alert to data security already and very sophisticated in that regard”. He indicated the government was preparing separate legislation to strengthen telecommunications security.

Brandis said law enforcement agencies already could access metadata, but this depended on telecommunications providers storing the information of their own volition.

He said changing business practices and technology meant some metadata was no longer being stored, or would no longer be stored. Brandis said a mandatory scheme was required to prevent “a very significant degradation of Australia’s counter-terrorism and general crime-fighting capabilities”.