Summary:

The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Amendment Bill (No. 2) 2025 passed both houses on 20 August 2026. The Senate carried the third reading 26 votes to 15 and agreed three government amendments that restore a three-year sunset on ASIO’s compulsory questioning powers and provide for a review by the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security from two years after the Act commences. The House of Representatives accepted those amendments the same afternoon. The law as passed widens the grounds on which ASIO may compel a person to answer questions, including sabotage and the promotion of communal violence, and it keeps the power to question minors aged 14 to 17. Most Coalition senators did not vote. Liberals Alex Antic and Andrew McLachlan joined the Greens, One Nation and independent David Pocock in voting no. The bill awaits Royal Assent and commences the day after.

 

Detailed Report

1. Senate Passage: 26 Votes to 15, Three Government Amendments

The Senate passed the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Amendment Bill (No. 2) 2025 at 14:46 on Thursday 20 August. The third-reading division was 26 votes to 15, a majority of 11. Forty-one of the chamber’s 76 senators voted.

Three government amendments were agreed. They restore a sunset so the compulsory questioning framework expires on the third anniversary of commencement unless Parliament extends it, and they provide for the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security to review how the powers have worked from two years after commencement. The House, which had passed the bill on 12 February, accepted the Senate amendments the same day. The legislation has now cleared both houses. It awaits Royal Assent and takes effect the day after.

The questioning powers themselves are wider than the scheme Parliament has been rolling forward since 2003. Adult warrants, previously confined to espionage, politically motivated violence and foreign interference, now also cover sabotage, attacks on Australia’s defence system, serious threats to territorial and border integrity, and the promotion of communal violence. The existing authority to question minors aged 14 to 17 in relation to politically motivated violence is unchanged.

 

2. Who Supported and Opposed the ASIO Bill

The 26 votes in favour were Labor’s and Jacqui Lambie Network senator Tammy Tyrrell’s.

The 15 against were nine Greens — Penny Allman-Payne, Mehreen Faruqi, Sarah Hanson-Young, Steph Hodgins-May, Nick McKim, who told the division, Barbara Pocock, David Shoebridge, Jordon Steele-John and Larissa Waters — Liberals Alex Antic and Andrew McLachlan, One Nation’s Sean Bell, Malcolm Roberts and Tyron Whitten, and independent David Pocock.

Pauline Hanson did not vote. One Nation still recorded three noes. The rest of the Liberal and National parties did not enter the chamber for the division. Roberts said afterwards that the bill passed because they abstained, and that it would have been defeated had they opposed it.

The Coalition had indicated it would support the bill once the government restored the three-year sunset. On the floor that support was absence, except for Antic and McLachlan.

Shoebridge moved at second reading that the Senate reject the bill and declare the questioning scheme a departure from the rule of law that should be repealed. That amendment failed 12–27. Debate was then cut short on the last sitting day of the week, a limit he called a guillotine.

 

3. Expanded ASIO Powers and Three-Year Sunset Clause

A compulsory questioning warrant is still issued on the application of ASIO’s Director-General and with the approval of the Attorney-General. The person named must appear and answer questions. Remaining silent or refusing to comply is a criminal offence; the maximum penalty commonly cited in the debate is five years’ imprisonment. The bill amends the questioning framework. It does not revive the older detention regime that once sat alongside it, though critics in the Senate continued to describe the powers as detention.

The new adult grounds sit on top of the existing heads of security. “Promotion of communal violence” is defined in the ASIO Act as activities directed to promoting violence between different groups in the Australian community in a manner that endangers the peace, order or good government of the Commonwealth. The same Act still contains section 17A, which says that lawful advocacy, protest or dissent is not by itself regarded as prejudicial to security. Critics in the Senate treated the new ground as wide enough to reach political organising that falls short of a criminal offence. The government and ASIO have pointed to a more polarised threat environment and to the Director-General of Security’s earlier warnings about communal violence.

The Act also changes who may serve as a prescribed authority — the independent person who supervises a questioning session — and how they can be removed. It requires more reporting to the Attorney-General about what occurs under a warrant. Post-charge questioning may take place only before a prescribed authority who is a retired judge. A consequential amendment to the Intelligence Services Act 2001 lets the intelligence committee review the framework.

The questioning scheme was first legislated in 2003. Parliament has extended it several times rather than let it lapse. A companion bill in 2025 pushed the previous sunset to 7 March 2027 so this larger rewrite could be debated. The Act now before the Governor-General replaces that holding pattern with the wider grounds and a fresh three-year clock that starts when the new law commences.

 

The Senate did not remove ASIO’s power to question 14- to 17-year-olds, a power the Law Council had sought to delete and which, on the public record, ASIO has never used. It did not give a person under warrant a stronger right to a lawyer of their own choosing, or stop ASIO from controlling which legal representative may be present.

 

5. Sunset Clause Restored to Secure Passage

When the bill was introduced it would have repealed the sunset altogether and made compulsory questioning a standing feature of the ASIO Act. That was the change that drew the sharpest resistance from the Law Council, the Australian Human Rights Commission and crossbench senators, and it was the condition on which the Coalition had withheld support.

The government gave the permanence plan away. Assistant Minister Nita Green told the Senate, in the minutes left under the time limit, that the government would move amendments “that ensure that a sunset clause exists for these powers” and that a PJCIS review of operational effectiveness would occur two years after commencement. Those amendments passed. The expansion of the questioning grounds, and the application of the scheme to minors, stayed in.

 

6. Chamber Reactions

Antic said a warrant can be used against a person who has never been charged and may never be charged. Putting the sunset back was “a good thing, but it is also, in the framework of this bill, a very small thing.” He singled out the communal-violence ground as the most alarming widening of the adult warrant. After the division he said he had voted against the bill because “extraordinary powers should never become ordinary,” and he named McLachlan as the other Coalition senator who had done the same.

Pocock said he did not believe “powers this grotesque and dangerous should be available to any organisation within a democracy.” He said the views of his constituents lined up with the Law Council and the Australian Human Rights Commission, and that attempts to justify the bill by reference to the Bondi attack should be dismissed.

Shoebridge said Labor and the Coalition had joined to “guillotine laws and ram them through this parliament without proper scrutiny on the last day of a sitting week.” The Greens had voted against the original scheme in 2003 and against every later attempt to keep the sunset from falling. He described the package as the largest expansion of secret interrogation powers in more than two decades: a 14-year-old could be taken in, questioned without a lawyer of their family’s choosing and without a court overseeing the session, then forbidden to say what had happened; remaining silent can attract five years in prison. After the vote he wrote that Labor and the Coalition were “in lock step” and that the Greens would remember it at the next election.

Roberts said that once powers of this kind are treated as a standing feature they are almost never wound back. “What's the point of security with no personal freedom?” Hanson said the bill was “not serious about terrorism unless it names the ideology driving the threat: radical Islam.” One Nation would have reconsidered its opposition if that language had been included. It was not.

Green used the time remaining to put the sunset and the two-year review on the record, and to accuse One Nation of saying one thing outside the chamber and voting another way inside it.

 

Conclusion

Parliament kept the wider warrant and the questioning of minors, and put a three-year limit back on the scheme the government had tried to make permanent. Labor supplied the votes. The Coalition, having asked for the sunset, largely did not attend the division that enacted it.