Australia politics live: bureaucrats face questions after classified cabinet documents left on plane | Australian politics

Josh Taylor

The Australian federal police (AFP) has defended its approaches to encrypted messaging app Session – which led to the company moving overseas – as “doing our job” and said the app was being used to share child abuse material.

Guardian Australia reported on Tuesday the Australian-based app had moved to Switzerland after approaches from police, including a visit to an employee’s home, to ask about encryption on the app. The organisation’s director, Alex Linton, said Australia’s regulatory environment was hostile to privacy tools.

The AFP acting commissioner, Ian McCartney, told Senate estimates on Tuesday night:

We don’t obviously allege any criminality on their behalf, but the app was being utilised to distribute serious child abuse material … the focus of our engagement with the company was identified opportunities to provide lawful assistance, including the removal of that really serious child abuse material from the platform.

McCartney said it was a productive conversation with the app company, and he said it was an independent decision they’ve made to move overseas, largely as a policy response, rather than police actions.

Greens senator and digital rights spokesperson, David Shoebridge, said senators would support the AFP identifying and removing that kind of material, but said the powers to request app developers to build capabilities to bypass encryption and the decision to move overseas did not make Australia safer:

No one’s any safer. No benefit to Australian law enforcement, no benefit to anybody other than we lose an industry, and we lose the capability, and we lose those kinds of skills in Australia, this doesn’t make us safer. This doesn’t help capture these appalling offenders who are sharing this material.

The AFP revealed that, in the last financial year, it had made no requests for assistance or capability requests of app developers, but there had been 66 assistance requests issued by other agencies.

Session was contacted for comment.

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Peter Hannam

Senate estimates hears Treasury thoughts on US election scenarios

The treasurer, Jim Chalmers, sought Treasury advice on US election scenarios, estimates has heard.

Treasury is before Senate estimates this morning, and the secretary, Steven Kennedy, has been pressed by the Liberal senator Jane Hume about what the government has asked about US election scenarios.

Now, it would be a surprise if Treasury had not done some assessment of how economic policies might change in the world’s biggest economy. That’s especially so when there’s a chance that Donald Trump might be elected as the 47th president.

Kennedy said he had no expertise to judge who might win (not Robinson Crusoe there), and it sounds like the analysis is in line with private economists.

Trump has promised to slap broad-based tariffs on imports, including up to 60% on those from China. (He wouldn’t need congressional support for such a move.)

Anyway, Kennedy said such a move would have “flow-on consequences” for Australia, not least because China accounts for about a third of our exports. Various models would need to be tweaked.

In addition, “the imposition of trade restrictions, such as tariffs, typically lead to lower growth and higher inflation”, Kennedy said, echoing the economic consensus.

The US economy, as it happens, is outperforming most others, and it might be a post-election puzzle to solve to understand why the incumbent Biden/Harris administration hadn’t got more electoral support from it.

Kennedy doesn’t talk about what a “Kamala Harris wins” scenario looks like, but it’s generally assumed not a lot would change.

Karen Middleton

No matter who wins, the US has no more trusted ally than Australia, Kennedy says

The US ambassador, Caroline Kennedy, has reflected on the history of suffrage for women and African Americans in her country as she reminded guests at a US embassy election day breakfast that “every vote counts”.

Kennedy told the crowd that she felt “most American” on election day because “the right to vote is so fundamental to our democracy”.

She said:

Every voice counts and the right to vote is not something that any of us can take for granted.

In this election, and every other, the battle is ongoing, with efforts to expand and limit voting rights. It’s a constant struggle in our politics and in this age of disinformation that is only becoming more intense. So when I vote in the US election, I think of all the names of heroes who sacrificed to give me this right. And for those of us all who live in a democracy, it’s something to celebrate, something to protect.

She said she returned on the weekend from meetings in the US to be in Australia on election day:

I wanted to make clear to Australians that no matter who wins, the United States has no more trusted and capable ally. And there’s a lot of rhetoric on both sides of this debate, especially on one side, the fundamentals are not in question.

Rafqa Touma

Legal Aid NSW says new client portal ‘a gamechanger for our clients’

$1.6m is going to a new Legal Aid NSW client portal.

The platform will be optimised for mobile phones, to provide clients with live updates, access to correspondence, document uploads and information on court appearances and other appointments, according to a statement from the office of Jihad Dib, the customer service and digital government minister.

Legal Aid NSW provided half a million client services in 2022-23. More than 50% were provided in regional and rural areas.

The new portal, supported under the Digital Restart Fund, will make information more accessible and “minimise the need for clients to call Legal Aid NSW because they will be directly notified of updates to their case”, the statement said.

The platform is expected to be operational by late 2025.

The CEO of Legal Aid NSW, Monique Hitter, said:

This portal is a gamechanger for our clients.

It enables them to easily view information about their cases, their lawyers, their appointments and court dates.

… Delivering 24/7 access to key information, this portal makes it easier for people to deal with their legal problems.

Karen Middleton

Kennedy calls for special Aukus visa to promote Australia-US collaboration

The US ambassador, Caroline Kennedy, has been busy! We mentioned her media appearances below. She has also likened the Aukus nuclear submarine pact to the 1961 decision by her father, the late president John F Kennedy, to send humans to the moon within a decade and called for a special Aukus visa to facilitate industry collaboration.

Addressing the biennial Submarine Institute of Australia conference on Tuesday, Kennedy said the Aukus partners needed new measures to make it easier to work together:

We need to increase connectivity between systems, making it easier and faster for work to proceed. We need new ideas to make this possible. An Aukus visa is one way to move this along.

She invoked the audacity of her late father’s vision, acknowledging that some Australians “doubt the complexity and boldness of Aukus”. She said of her father:

He obviously set our nation on the path that has created the information economy, that has benefited our country for all these years. And he did it because it was hard and because he knew it would bring out the best in us. And those kinds of challenges always do. I really feel like Australia is ready for this, is embracing this challenge.

When then President Kennedy made his moon-landing pledge on 25 May 1961, the longest space flight by US personnel had lasted just five minutes.

“And he committed to send a man to the moon in 10 years,” Kennedy said. “So I have absolutely no doubt – and I know I speak for my colleagues in the US government – that this is the same kind of thing.”

Kennedy described Aukus as “a critical element” in the collective effort to sustain peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific region:

There were a lot of people who doubted that this could be done. That it was too complicated, too bold, too revolutionary, whether the US would share its most sensitive nuclear technology, whether the three partners could reform their export control regimes to allow us to succeed … I think we can all say that the doubters were wrong.

Kennedy said at least 78 US-trained Australian navy personnel would eventually serve on US submarines and more than 50 civilian Australian Submarine Corporation personnel were currently training at the Pearl Harbor shipyard.

The ambassador urged Australian companies to undertake the US defence industry vendor training process and become component suppliers for the Virginia-class submarines.

She said the money was there to build the industrial place but “more players” were needed.

She called Aukus “a partnership about what we stand for, not who we stand against”.

That sinking feeling – AAP reports that, minutes after getting off a plane in Doha, an Australian government staffer urgently alerted officials a locked bag containing classified cabinet documents was missing.

The papers were being carried by the ministerial and parliamentary services staffer travelling with Senator Murray Watt, the then agriculture minister, on a flight home from the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation conference in July 2023.

The curious case of the missing documents was first made public in early October and has been a point of interest at the latest round of Senate estimates hearings in Canberra.

Agriculture department officials were quizzed about the international incident during a tense exchange on Tuesday morning.

Tim Simpson, the department’s first assistant secretary for people, property and security, confirmed details from an internal investigation, saying the papers were left on a plane in the early hours of 7 July.

The Senator and staffers had flown from Mumbai to Doha on an Indian airline on their way back to Australia from the UN conference in Rome.

The staffer left the secure bag containing the cabinet documents on the aircraft, Simpson told the hearing:

What I can confirm is the documents were carried in an appropriate container … and secured correctly for the classification.

Australian embassy staff in India were contacted about 10 or 15 minutes after the travelling party got off the plane and staffers tried and failed to get the documents back.

“At the time the documents weren’t there when they were able to get back on and look for them,” Simpson said.

The agriculture secretary, Adam Fennessy, said security was taken very seriously and staff were retrained after the incident.

At the end of questioning, the hearing was told the staffer worked for ministerial and parliamentary services.

“I hope the poor devil got over it,” the Labor senator Glenn Sterle said.

Caroline Kennedy, the US ambassador to Australia, says as an ambassador she’s not supposed to talk about politics … but went on to say (after the ABC Breakfast host Michael Rowland said “assuming you did vote for Kamala Harris …”:

I think the issues that are on the ballot this time are important to women.

She’s made that really clear. Donald Trump is focusing more on immigration.

And she points out that in the US, where voting is not compulsory, it’s “all about turnout, who shows up on election day”, and that they need to get young people to the polls. But she wouldn’t change their system:

I think our system is great. It’s so complicated, gives Australians something to talk about all year long for four years. So I wouldn’t change a thing! But the way you do it is really impressive, and I have learned a lot on that while I have been here.

She says the US has “an incredibly strong and transparent system despite attempts to interfere with it from abroad, as we heard from our national security agencies”.

“And obviously some people who don’t want to accept the result are going to start saying, you know, that there’s a problem if it’s not clear, but I think it’s shaping up to be very close,” she says, on the potential for unrest.