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POLICE are being given authority to tap telephone conversations at such an unprecedented rate that Australians are 20 times more likely to be bugged than Americans.

But despite the rate of tapping increasing ninefold over the past decade, the ability of Australian authorities to secure convictions as a result of listening to telephone calls is lower than in the US.

In the past four years alone, the number of phone-tap warrants approved by the courts and the Administrative Appeals Tribunal has tripled from 675 to 2157 – one-third more than all state and federal taps approved in the US.

In contrast to the US, our national security authorities, including the Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation, do not publish statistics of their bugs.

The extent of the tapping has prompted federal Labor justice spokesman Daryl Melham to call for a new body to oversee the use of phone taps by Australian police, possibly based on a model used in Britain , which has a chief surveillance commissioner.

"There is an urgent need to strengthen the resources available for external scrutiny of telephone interception activities and other forms of intrusive surveillance," Mr Melham said.

Labor analysis shows that only seven of the 2164 police applications for interception warrants were rejected by the courts last year. Since 1999, when Administrative Appeals Tribunal officers were first given power to issue warrants, numbers have increased sharply.

AAT officers now issue 94 per cent of all warrants, Family Court judges 5 per cent, and Supreme Court judges only 1 per cent.

The Australian Council of Civil Liberties said the explosion in warrants showed that police were forum shopping and targeting sympathetic judicial officers.

Cameron Murphy, secretary of the council, demanded the federal Government publish more detailed information to reveal if a handful of judges and officials were responsible for most of the warrants.

"We think Australians would be aghast if they knew so many people's phone conversations were being bugged," Mr Murphy said.

Labor also warned that Australian police were achieving far fewer criminal convictions per phone tap than US authorities.

Between 1996 and 2001, US police made 3.31 arrests and secured 1.55 convictions for each phone tap.

Over the same period Australian agencies made only 0.63 arrests per phone tap and 0.46 convictions.

A spokesman for Mr Melham said technological advances were part of the reason for the explosion in tapping.

All telecommunications providers were now required to construct their facilities so that police could tap phones centrally instead of climbing telegraph poles.

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