The Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2025 updates Australia’s interception, surveillance and covert‐operations regimes to ensure they operate as intended, preserve fair-trial rights, and align administrative responsibilities with current departmental arrangements.

It amends the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979, Surveillance Devices Act 2004 and Crimes Act 1914 to refine disclosure and admissibility of network warrant information, transfer the Communications Access Coordinator role, permit controlled access to stored communications for testing, modernise international production orders, and clarify thresholds for controlled operations in online environments.

The Bill amends key federal statutes to modernise Australia’s telecommunications and law-enforcement frameworks:

• Schedule 1 (TIA Act & SD Act): Allows protected network activity warrant information and network activity warrant intercept information to be used, communicated or recorded to satisfy pre-trial and ongoing disclosure obligations and to be admitted in evidence where necessary to ensure a fair trial or to rebut evidence led by the defence.
• Schedule 2 (TIA Act): Transfers the statutory function of the Communications Access Coordinator from the Attorney-General’s Department to the Department of Home Affairs to reflect current Administrative Arrangements.
• Schedule 3 (TIA Act): Aligns the framework for development and testing authorisations under section 31A, permitting limited access to stored communications alongside live interception, and subjects all testing data to the stringent use, disclosure and destruction safeguards in Part 2-6 of the TIA Act.
• Schedule 4 (TIA Act Schedule 1): Replaces “intercepting” with the neutral term “accessing,” and expressly permits prescribed communications providers to comply with international production orders by copying stored communications, ensuring technical neutrality and capturing all practical data-retrieval methods.
• Schedule 5 (Crimes Act): Clarifies the threshold for authorising and varying controlled operations—requiring satisfaction only as to the direct and reasonably foreseeable consequences of participants’ unlawful conduct—and confirms that dealing with or facilitating access to sexually explicit material in online covert operations targeting offenders does not itself breach the prohibition on sexual offences.

These amendments balance intelligence-collection powers with legal safeguards, modernise technical definitions, and ensure administrative coherence.