Police and spies have the powers they were seeking

Now that parliament looks set to sign off on the new espionage laws, the onus is on our police and security agencies to actually go out and use them.

Getting these laws through parliament has not been without difficulty. Australia’s relationship with Beijing has been strained considerably in recent months, thanks largely to the public conversation around foreign interference — read Chinese interference. Australian exporters shipping into China are being hit with go-slow campaigns and Beijing is refusing to issue visas to delegations of visiting journalists, even when those delegations are run by China-friendly outfits such as the Australia China Relations Institute.

Plainly, Beijing is sending a message. So be it. China’s intrusion into Australian democratic life reached a point where an answer was required if Australia was to preserve the integrity of its institutions.

ASIO told us repeatedly that espionage had reached “unprecedented’’ levels but not much could be done because our foreign interference laws were prehistoric. Well, that’s now changed. The agencies have been given all the powers they asked for. The media “carve-outs’’ that so worried ASIO director-general Duncan Lewis on the ground they could be exploited by hostile intelligence services, have not materialised. Instead, there are stronger protections for journalists handling secret material. It is now up to the AFP and ASIO to demonstrate the need for these laws with successful, public prosecutions of hostile foreign agents.

It was telling that Attorney-General Christian Porter spoke of the need to pass the legislation before by-elections on July 28. “We are staring down five by-elections which will be very critical to Australia’s democratic complexion,’’ he said yesterday.

“It struck us that given the changes to the threat environment over the last six months and given we are looking at five by-elections in the near future, it was utterly critical the EFI Bill was passed.”

Porter’s message was clear. The kind of spectacular acts of democratic vandalism that marked the US presidential election, the Brexit vote and the French presidential election are no longer spectacular at all. They can happen in Longman and in Braddon and in Mayo.

They are the new normal.