EMMA ALBERICI, PRESENTER: This story is about federal politics and that short-lived burqa ban in Parliament House and the Abbott Government's new national security laws. We're joined now from our Parliament House studio by Greens Senator Scott Ludlam.

Welcome to the program, Senator.

SCOTT LUDLAM, GREENS DEFENCE SPOKESMAN: Hi, Emma.

EMMA ALBERICI: The Prime Minister has asked the Speaker, Bronwyn Bishop, to drop a plan to force people in the Parliament with covered faces to sit in a glassed chamber. What are the public to make of the Government's apparent indecision on this one?

SCOTT LUDLAM: I have no idea. It wouldn't surprise me if the public are confused and kind of disgusted. This a debate that really should have been shut down by the Prime Minister two days ago.

EMMA ALBERICI: Is it safe for people visiting the Parliament to be wearing any identity-concealing outfits, be it burqas, balaclavas or motorcycle helmets?

SCOTT LUDLAM: There's security checkpoints at all of the public entrances into the building and I don't see any reason why you would apply any more or less security than you apply at airports. So people are scanned with metal detectors, identities are made known to the security staff at the door. I don't see why this is being blown so vastly out of proportion.

EMMA ALBERICI: The Prime Minister seems to imply that it's the media's fault.

SCOTT LUDLAM: Um, let's not get involved in that circular argument. I just really hope we can move on and talk about something else. I suspect this is actually quite distressing for people who are feeling targeted and marginalised as it is.

EMMA ALBERICI: OK, well national security laws passed this week. You've taken particular issue with criminalising the reporting of national intelligence operations.

SCOTT LUDLAM: Yeah.

EMMA ALBERICI: Isn't it sensible to keep special operations secret?

SCOTT LUDLAM: Well this category of thing called special operations didn't exist until the Parliament passed it and ASIO have operated in near total secrecy for years without needing this extra category. I took my lead from the media organisations, including the representatives of most of the parliamentary press gallery, who said the laws were unacceptable and would effectively criminalise national security reporting. That's something that we actually really need more than ever in the current environment.

EMMA ALBERICI: But isn't it very much entirely dependent on whether the Attorney-General declares those events special intelligence operations?

SCOTT LUDLAM: Yeah, it is, and there's absolutely no restraints around these issues apart from that. And so, just to give you one quick example, you guys have reported extensively on the bugging by ASIS of the East Timorese cabinet rooms a couple of years ago, apparently, you could say, to prejudice negotiations over gas concessions. And now ASIO is pursuing some of the witnesses, including legal counsel. I that had been declared a special intelligence operation, none of that would have made the front page or the TV and I think that's incredibly dangerous.

EMMA ALBERICI: But if reporting on a special intelligence operation alerts someone to the fact that they're being watched, for instance, and means authorities can no longer catch would-be terrorists in the act of doing the wrong thing, then potentially reporting that operation could foil an arrest, couldn't it?

SCOTT LUDLAM: Yeah, it could. We're not talking about espionage here, we're talking about public interest reporting. We know why the Government's doing this and - because they spell it out in the documents that accompany the bill. They explicitly reference reporting of these kind of issues overseas and you might as well just have pinned a picture of Edward Snowden to the document that was tabled in Parliament this week. And the fact is there are public interest whistleblowers who will now face severe increases in penalties and journalists and people working for organisations like the ABC, who if they publish one of these SIOs or even allude to its existence, you can be prosecuted and sent to prison for 10 years. I'm not a journalist. I really wish journalists had stuck up for this thing before it passed the Parliament, and now it's law, and I think it's incredibly dangerous.

EMMA ALBERICI: Well, Labor leader Bill Shorten told Lateline last night that people who believe journalists will go to jail for 10 years over this have got it wrong.

SCOTT LUDLAM: Well that's nice that he believes that. Glenn Greenwald, the American journalist who was in receipt of the tranche of documents by Edward Snowden, tweeted on the night that the bill passed the Senate that he wouldn't do national security reporting in Australia anymore. So it's fine for the Leader of the Opposition to say that because he basically stayed out of the fight and didn't turn up for it. I take my lead, as I said, from the media organisations who made submissions to this inquiry, who said it's dangerous and it shouldn't be passed into law.

EMMA ALBERICI: Well Mr Shorten says Labor put up 17 amendments which protect the rights of journalists and whistleblowers and those who think otherwise misunderstand Labor's role in making these laws better than they may have otherwise been.

SCOTT LUDLAM: Labor put up no amendments. They voted for Government amendments that were supportable, but went no way at all towards assuaging the concerns of the people who wrote such strong submissions, right across the board, from the legal community, the media community, civil rights, digital rights advocates. So, I think we need the Labor Party, before the next batch comes down the pipeline - being mandatory data retention for the whole population - the Labor Party needs to step up and start behaving like a party of opposition.

EMMA ALBERICI: So what do you make of Bill Shorten telling us that he put up 17 amendments which made the bill better?

SCOTT LUDLAM: What I saw when the bill was voted through the Senate 9.30 last Thursday was Labor just meekly supporting Government amendments and chopping every improvement that the crossbenchers - not just the Greens, but senators Leyonhjelm, Madigan and Xenophon put forward. Defeated every single thing. Voted with George Brandis, one after another. It was not a particularly edifying display. And now these things are passed into law and they're very difficult to get off the statute books once they're there.

EMMA ALBERICI: Today you raised the spectre of our new national security laws resulting in something like the jailing of Al Jazeera journalist Peter Greste in Egypt. You're not seriously comparing our judges to Egyptian judges, are you?

SCOTT LUDLAM: No, not the judges, but the fact that he was jailed for prejudicing national security, and again, that is a comparison that's been drawn from submissions that media organisations put to this inquiry. It's very, very dangerous territory that we're playing with here, at a time when we need a spotlight on the operation of clandestine agencies. I don't think it's ever been more important than it is now.

EMMA ALBERICI: But don't you think it's a little alarmist to be making that comparison?

SCOTT LUDLAM: No, I don't think it's alarmist at all or I wouldn't have made it. He's been jailed for seven years into a hole in the ground in Cairo for doing national security reporting that deeply upset the Egyptian authorities. The penalty here in Australia for disclosing one of these SIOs isn't seven years, it's 10.

EMMA ALBERICI: What sorts of stories? You mentioned the East Timorese issue. Can you envisage other stories that perhaps would have been gagged by these new laws?

SCOTT LUDLAM: If they have been covered at the time by one of these SIOs, yes. They can't be declared retrospectively, we understand. So we're dealing in hypotheticals. But on ASIO's advice - I don't know if you recall this - in 2005, Australia deported a US peace activist, Scott Parkin, for having strong views about the operations of Halliburton. That's one example. Mr Haneef, again, on ASIO's advice. We're not talking about espionage, we're talking about public interest reporting of the operation of these agencies.

EMMA ALBERICI: But again, it'll be entirely dependent, won't it, on whether the Attorney-General declares them to be special intelligence operations?

SCOTT LUDLAM: That's right.

EMMA ALBERICI: Do we have any idea how that will be judged?

SCOTT LUDLAM: No. Well it's not in the act. There's nothing at all that's sketched in the act. It's quite a high degree of discretion. I don't know about you, Emma, this is just from my point of view, I don't trust our current Attorney-General. I don't trust him. And I think we need strong journalism, particularly national security journalists in the field, reporting on the operation of the way this government is handling national security and the operations of the agencies themselves. And again, I want to make a really important distinction: we're not talking about espionage, and the work that these agencies do, a lot of it does have to stay covert. We're talking about these kinds of examples - East Timor, Scott Parkin, Mr Haneef - where things go badly wrong. That's where we need the media the most.

EMMA ALBERICI: What do don't you trust about the Attorney-General?

SCOTT LUDLAM: I shouldn't be having to persuade you of this. This feels kind of remarkable. I don't trust competence or motivation, quite frankly. Could probably just leave it at that.

EMMA ALBERICI: Well the next piece of national security legislation will cover the retention of metadata for two years. Do you really think Australians mind giving up some freedoms if it means they can live in a safer society?

SCOTT LUDLAM: Yeah, if that were the balance that were being struck, but it's not. The first thing I'd contest is that data retention is not a national security bill. By far the largest users of warrantless metadata accesses are agencies like Centrelink, the police, anti-corruption agencies, obviously doing legitimate work, but also the Victorian Taxi Directorate, the RSPCA, every local government in the country has the ability to get hold of this material and it's really detailed material. It can be incredibly invasive. It's everywhere you carry your mobile phone around can be tracked using metadata. So, yeah, I think actually Australians are going be quite upset when they realise that in the name of national security we're being put under the surveillance microscope. It's completely unnecessary.

EMMA ALBERICI: But if - you know, I hate to roll this one out, but if you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to fear, have you?

SCOTT LUDLAM: That's right. That's what they said in East Germany. I think it's incredibly creepy. If you imagine the idea of having somebody sitting right over your left shoulder, following you round every day, recording everybody you talk to, everywhere you go, what you're wearing, if anything changed hands, follow you into the bathroom, recording your most intimate relationships, we wouldn't tolerate that kind of creepy behaviour in the real world, and yet we're expected to accept it when George Brandis says it should happen online. I just - I don't buy it. It doesn't make people safer, I guess is the point.

EMMA ALBERICI: Scott Ludlam, we're out of time. Thank you very much.

SCOTT LUDLAM: Thanks, Emma.