australia: leading the world in spying on its citizens

This article in The Age is superficially positive – the new British PM is having trouble getting extended detention powers in anti-terrorist legislation implemented in Britain due to rational parliamentary opposition.  The reason is a report from the Joint Committee on Human Rights:

The Joint Committee on Human Rights said in a report it had seen no case where it was necessary to detain suspects without charge for longer than 28 days. The committee also denounced as “Kafkaesque” Britain’s so-called control order system, which curbs the freedom of terror suspects.

So far so good.  However, the report also contains information which would suprise most Australians.  The report argues that, rather than detaining people for long periods without trial, the UK should merely increase the extent to which it spies electronically on its own citizens – following the leading example set by Australia:

The committee relied heavily on evidence from Australian police to endorse the use of intercepted evidence, such as telephone tapping, in bringing criminal prosecutions.

The report included testimony by Britain’s Director of Public Prosecutions, Ken Macdonald, who said: “In Australia, I was told by the head of the NSW Crime Commission that prosecutors who did not rely on intercept evidence were not being ‘serious’ in this area of work.

“I spoke to the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, all of the crime commissions, the Commonwealth DPP, the NSW DPP, the Australian Federal Police. Everybody without exception told us that this material is of enormous use. It is cheap, it is effective; it drives up the number of guilty pleas and it leads to successful prosecutions.”

Followers of US politics might have heard of the ongoing furore over the US government spying on its own citizens with warrantless wiretaps, a steadily growing scandal which looks set to bring down Attorney-General Gonzales and has the potential to render untenable the position of other members of the Bush Administration.  Americans seem to care deeply that their own government is spying on them without their knowledge – yet Australians seem content to have simultaneously a ‘world leading’ domestic spying programme and one of the weakest sets of intelligence oversight provisions of any western democracy.