Breakthrough! No normalisation for ASIO’s abnormal authoritarian powers. #ASIO #Coalition #Albanese

Added: 2026-05-18

[00:00:00]Breaking news, we've achieved an enormous breakthrough on the ASIO bill that's being debated in the Senate this week.

[00:00:08]The breakthrough is that the Liberal National Coalition have said they will move an amendment to retain the sunset clause on ASIO's extraordinary interrogation powers that this bill wanted to make permanent by removing the sunset clause.

[00:00:24]This is an enormous breakthrough.

[00:00:26]The Liberal National Coalition were fully set to to rubber stamp this bill when it was put up.

[00:00:32]When there was a debate in the house in February on the 12th of February, it only lasted half an hour.

[00:00:39]There were only four people contributed to that debate. Two of them were teals.

[00:00:43]Alex Hawke for the Liberals fully endorsed the bill, and Tony Burke, the minister, was the other one to speak and insist that they needed these powers, and they needed to make them permanent.

[00:00:54]But, the Citizens Party had discovered these powers were being legislated in January.

[00:01:00]We flew into enormous mobilization to expose this bill and what these powers represented. We were best positioned to do this because we are the ones that had fought these powers when they originally introduced back in 2002-2003.

[00:01:14]And our work back then caused forced the Labor Party at the time to shift their support for the powers, and it was because of that that Labor back then demanded a sunset clause so the powers would be temporary.

[00:01:28]And you may know the story that it was a young member for Grayndler who gave a fiery speech in Parliament in 2003 quoting Hermann Göring and likening these powers to the Nazis. And of course, that was Anthony Albanese, who bizarrely is the guy pushing to expand and normalize these powers today.

[00:01:46]Um so when they said they wanted to remove the sunset clause, they actually said they wanted to normalize these powers.

[00:01:53]They wanted to normalize powers where ASIO can be a secret police, can grab anyone off the street it likes, even children as young as 14. You don't have to be a suspect. You don't have to You don't get the protection of the courts because ASIO doesn't require a warrant to do this to you.

[00:02:08]A warrant from a judge. You have no right to silence.

[00:02:12]And that's what they wanted to normalize, these kinds of powers and apply them to everything ASIO does as a matter of routine. And that's why we fought so hard to stop them. Now, this is not a full victory. A full victory would be defeating this bill, but to at least force the coalition to realize that the sunset clause need to be retained is a testament to our work.

[00:02:33]It's a testament to all the people who made calls and sent emails. You have forced them to shift. So, congratulate yourself for that. This is effective work if you focus enough and work hard enough to do it, and that's what we've done. Keep fighting always though because we should never accept these powers should ever be normalized.