news Federal Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus has flatly refused to take part in a live election interview on key technology issues in his portfolio, such as copyright reform, data retention, telecommunications surveillance and Internet piracy, stipulating instead that all questions on the issues must be submitted in writing.
The Attorney-General’s portfolio is a key one for the technology sector, during election periods or otherwise. Over the past several years, through several consecutive Attorneys-General under the Australian Labor Party (Nicola Roxon, Robert McClelland and now Dreyfus), the policies of the Attorney-General as well as the activities of the Attorney-General’s Department and other portfolio agencies such as the Australian Federal Police and the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, have constantly been debated in Australia’s technology press.
Some of the more high-profile issues have included the Government’s controversial support for new data retention and telecommunications legislation that would give law enforcement and intelligence agencies unprecedented power to look into Australians’ online lives; an ongoing series of closed talks held between the ISP industry and content owners such as movie studios; copyright and intellectual property law reform; Internet filtering and more.
Delimiter has invited Dreyfus to conduct an election interview on these and other related issues in the Attorney-General’s portfolio, either in person or via telephone, several times over the past week. However, a spokesperson for the Labor MP has repeatedly confirmed that such an interview would not be granted, citing Dreyfus’ limited availability during the election period. The spokesperson also would not commit to making Dreyfus available during a doorstop interview in Sydney, where the majority of Australia’s technology press is based.
Instead, the spokesperson has invited Delimiter to submit questions in writing via email.
Dreyfus is not known to have discussed issues relating to the technology industry during the election campaign; in addition, the Attorney-General has only commented in a limited fashion on such issues previous to the campaign, despite intense public interest in issues such as the Government’s data retention plans.
During the election campaign, Dreyfus has appeared to focus instead on a series of local launches to support regional legal services around Australia.
For example, last week Dreyfus attended the the William Light School Trades Training Centre in South Australia to make a funding announcement with fellow Labor MP Steve Georganas. That same week Dreyfus attended the launch of the ‘FareShare’ kitchen in Victoria, where the MP announced new funding for the region’s Homeless Persons Legal Clinic. That week, Dreyfus also visited another location in Melbourne’s outer north, with the Labor candidate for the seat of Scullin, Andrew Giles, where Dreyfus announced the Rudd Labor Government would provide an extra $480,000 over the next four years to the Whittlesea Community Legal Service in Epping.
This week, Dreyfus has made several other similar announcements regarding boosts to local legal facilities. For example, this morning Dreyfus was in Queensland with the Labor MP for Oxley, announcing an extra $320,000 for the South West Brisbane Community Legal Centre. Yesterday, Dreyfus was scheduled to appear on Sky News’ ViewPoint program, although it is not clear whether any issues relevant to the technology sector were discussed.
The news comes as a number of organisations and commentators in Australia have called for greater debate during the election campaign of digital rights issues.
For example, several weeks ago, as the election period kicked off, the Australian chapter of the global Internet Society, which aims to promote the open development, evolution and use of the Internet for the benefit of global society, called for both sides of politics to urgently discuss digital rights issues during the election. “The Australian Chapter of the Internet Society calls upon the major parties in the forthcoming Federal election to come clean on your policies and provide urgent clarity with respect to the increasing infringements on the online activities of Australians,” the group said in a statement.
“It is time the Australian people had a chance to participate in an open discussion on where the line sits between law enforcement, crime prevention and our right to privacy,” Narelle Clark, President of the Australian Chapter said at the time. “From s313 of the Telecommunications Act through secret proposals for metadata retention to PRISM, the Australian people might be forgiven for thinking they still lived in a penal colony. These actions need the clear light of the Australian sun.”
At the time, the Internet Society Board of Trustees, which was holding a meeting in Berlin, called on the global Internet community to stand together in support of open Internet access, freedom,
and privacy.
“Robert Hinden, Chair of the Board of Trustees, stated, “Berlin is a city where freedom triumphed over tyranny. Human and technological progress are not based on building walls, and we are confident that the human ideals of communication and creativity will always route around these kinds of attempts to constrain them. We are especially disappointed that the very governments that have traditionally supported a more balanced role in Internet governance are consciously and deliberately hosting massive Internet surveillance programs.”
In a commentary article for the Conversation, Sean Rintel, lecturer in strategic communications at the University of Queensland, wrote that both politicians and journalists were avoiding discussing digital rights issues during the election, despite the issues being of strong public interest.
“While in some ways this lack of focus on digital rights is a product of a lack of relevant announcements by political candidates, the lack of active reporting on these issues is also an indictment on the media given how much the digital rights issues raised by Edward Snowden, Bradley Manning, and Julian Assange cases completely dominated the news almost immediately prior to the election,” wrote Rintel. “… as a citizen I also require the fourth (and fifth) estate to investigate all aspects of the election, both what is said and what is not. For me this means asking politicians the hard questions about digital rights. For others it will be different issues that seem to have been missed in the perpetual present.”
The only parties known to have focused at all on online rights and privacy during the election are minor parties such as the Greens, the Pirate Party and WikiLeaks, which have all taken a position against increasing Internet surveillance, and towards further transparency of the process by which Australians’ digital rights are administered.
Delimiter also intends to invite Shadow Attorney George Brandis to a formal interview on digital rights issues during the election.
opinion/analysis
Wow, crybaby Renai, right? It’d be very easy to simply dismiss this article as the product of a jilted minor journalist who is unhappy that he can’t get an interview with an important and busy Federal Minister during an election cycle. Lots of people will ask me, after reading this article, why I didn’t simply agree to do an email interview with Dreyfus. Knowing my own ego as I do, this is a logical argument, and normally I am quick to level such conclusions at other journalists who write these kinds of articles.
However, I think this is a somewhat naive view in this case.
For starters, I’ve sent many questions to and interviewed Federal Attorney-Generals by email for the better part of a decade now. But the extremely secretive office of the Attorney-General and the Attorney General’s Department always gives very vague answers of only one paragraph per question in this kind of interview. As a journalist, I don’t see a point in conducting this kind of interview with Dreyfus, when I know that all I’m going to get back is carefully censored and extremely vague platitudes. The only real answers I’ve got from the Attorney-General’s portfolio over the past few years have come under Freedom of Information — and then heavily censored and redacted.
With a live interview of any kind, at least the subject can’t run away from the questions.
Dreyfus’ attitude also runs contra to the normal run of affairs about access to politicians. Delimiter has strong access to comment from other Labor Minister such as Communications Minister Anthony Albanese and Minister Assisting for the Digital Economy Kate Lundy, Parliamentary Secretary for Broadband Ed Husic. In addition, on the other side of the fence, we also have good relationships with Shadow Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull, Greens Communications Spokesperson Scott Ludlam. Even when it comes to Ministers from State Governments, we enjoy strong access.
Dreyfus is virtually the only Federal Government Minister or politician with any interest in the technology sector who won’t talk to Delimiter.
What we’re seeing at the moment, as Sean Rintel so perfectly wrote in his article for The Conversation, is a situation where both major sides of politics are completely unwilling to discuss what their policies are around Australians’ digital rights, because they know that both sides largely share the same policies, and that by and large those policies are incredibly unpopular.
Neither major side of politics wants to discuss out loud the fact that they support massively expanding Internet surveillance of Australians and storing data about every single telephone call or email conversation they participate in. Neither side of politics wants to discuss the fact that they are under immense pressure from content industries not to reform archaic copyright legislation. Neither side of politics wants to discuss Section 313 of the Telecommunications Act, which government agencies are using to secretly filter secret lists of websites from public viewing. Neither side of politics wants to discuss the secret talks the Attorney-General’s Department has been hosting for the past several years between the ISP and content industries. Neither side of politics wants to discuss Australia’s support for and participation in major US surveillance activities such as the NSA’s PRISM program.
The only people who do want to see these issues discussed are ordinary Australians, and the minor parties, such as the Greens, Pirate Party and WikiLeaks. Well, I suggest that if people do want to see these issues discussed in the remaining three weeks of the election campaign, that they raise their voice about it now and make some noise. Because there is a very limited window of opportunity.
I’d like to see, as a first step, the Greens, Pirate Party and WikiLeaks get together to hold an election debate on the issue, inviting the major parties as well. If they don’t turn up, the debate should be held and widely publicised anyway. I know that representatives from all these groups read Delimiter. I’d get onto that now, if I were you guys. After all, these issues represent a significant point of difference between the major and minor parties. Now is the time to exploit that, for all it’s worth.
Image credit: Attorney-General’s Department
Federal Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus has flatly refused to take part in a live election interview on key technology issues in his portfolio, such as copyright reform, data retention, telecommunications surveillance and Internet piracy, stipulating instead that all questions on the issues must be submitted in writing.
I guess they need it in writing so they can clear it with head office (in Washington…)
He won’t have an answer/opinion until the overlords in US Gov tell him what answers/opinions to have.
And then there is this;
“Yesterday there were reports that David Miranda, the partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald was detained. Now,various MPs and other public figures have expressed their unease over the detention and demanded justification for the incident from the police. Meanwhile, Glenn Greenwald has threatened to be more aggressive with his reporting regarding the UK secret services and to release more documents about their activities, Brazil has stated that it expects no repeat of the incident, and one of the MPs involved in passing the anti-terrorism legislation used for the detention has said: ‘those of us who were part of passing this legislation certainly would not have expected it to be used in a case of this kind.'”
Because what politician in their right mind would thank about how laws could be misused by the powers that lobbied so hard for them?!
Bravo. Someone make that Green-Wiki-Pirate debate happen, and stream it. Everywhere.
Agreed, such a debate is a great idea. Willing to bet the MSM will ignore it as comprehensively as the major parties, though…
BTW Ren, you used the word ‘issue’ when you meant ‘interview’, here:
“Delimiter has invited Dreyfus to conduct an election issue… “
Cheers, fixed.
Keep up the good work, Renai. Do you have any contacts in the mainstream media who could help get this stuff out into the open?
Everybody please write letters about this to whichever newspaper(s) you read. Mainstream journalists need to be prompted to do their job.
Tom Elliot was going to interview Mark Dreyfus the other day on 3AW. I sent an email to ask about the AG dept. misleading parliament about not having draft legislation.
When I listened to the interview, you would have thought Dreyfus was the Immigration Minister – it was all about Asylum Seekers and the policy to send to PNG.
Why do I get the impression that there is a very small list of topics that he will discuss??
“Why do I get the impression that there is a very small list of topics that he will discuss??”
It’s a valid impression :) The list of topics is small, and the responses to any topic on the list are ill-defined and brief.
Why would we expect anything else? He’s a lawyer/politician.
Just like someone else we know all too well, that refuses to listen to people who know what they are talking about.
Your making a mistake thinking that politicians control the AGD, no matter which party is in power, their AG will have basically the same policies…
The real problem with folk in that portfolio (of either party), is that when backed into a corner they just pull the “national secrets” defence…
BTW, I just went to vote. (Early vote as I will be in Beijing). No Pirate Party listed on senate ticket.
Are you within an appropriate constituency?
What state/territory are you in? Looks like NSW, Qld, Vic, Tas only.
Good luck with any written questions!
I live in Melbourne where Cath Bowtell is trying to outst the Greens. I wrote (Email) to her last Wednesday asking for an assurance that Labor would not sneak in any “Clean Feed” policies at the last minute.
No reply as yet.
Dreyfus refused the interview and requires questions in writing for two reasons.
1. He simply doesn’t understand these important areas of his portfolio.
He can’t answer even basic questions in these areas without help from his department.
2. He has plenty to hide.
Anything that does come out during the election campaign about Lib or Lab policies in these areas can only be vote losers – so they have a tacit understanding not to talk about them.
The mainstream media is obsessed with “it’s the economy, stupid” and asylum seekers. Hence they won’t hold Lib or Lab to account about these crucial issues that will shape the kind of country, the kind of democracy, that Australia will be in the coming decades.
Totally agree with Renai. I would rather see these interviews done in person, so the answers can’t be sanitised or ignored
It looks like Dreyfus is just keeping the seat warm for George Brandis now. I would be far more interested to hear Brandis’s view on these things.
I wouldn’t wait up for that. I’ve been querying Brandis on these issues for years and never got a response.
Pirate Party Australia Senate Candidates would attend.
We would not have the resources to organise this alone.
Perhaps it is worth working together Renai?
Who does your party preference? I’ve gone right off Wikileaks after their preference deals…
Doesn’t matter who they preference spend an extra 15secs and assign your own.
It does, Wikileaks are obviously not the party people think they are going by their preferences (i.e. Directing preferences to parties that have no interest in privacy or accountability).
>Directing preferences to parties that have no interest in privacy or accountability
If you read the detail of what actually happened, it seems that there were a number of problems. However the preferences in Victoria are allegedly exactly right. Do you have a problem with the preferences in Victoria?
Unfortunately all parties have exactly 48 hours to do their preferences so in that pressure-cooker environment mistakes and misunderstandings will occur.
Your entitled to vote for whomever you like Orville, but after Wikileaks put the boot into Scott like that, they lost me…
Not sure if I am allowed to post links, however I shall attempt, our preferences are listed in a Press Release on the front page of our website however
Our Preferencing is available publically here, depending on your state.
http://pirateparty.org.au/2013/08/18/preferencing-statement-for-federal-election-2013/
All Parties preference sheets are available here
http://www.aec.gov.au/election/downloads.htm
Thanks for your interest!
TYVM for both links!
It is pirate party for me this election.
“Federal Attorney-Generals” – really? Is that the best attempt you could make at the plural?
How else would you pluralise “Attorney-General”?
Attorneys-General makes it sound like a position held by multiple people at once…
>How else would you pluralise “Attorney-General”?
Correctly.
The author of the article has it correct now.
“Attorneys-General” is the way to say it.
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