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Senator George Brandis conceded that there was a possibility some people might still try to get around the controversial legislation, which forces telecommunications companies to retain phone call and internet records on all customers for two years.
"Smart criminals devise ways to get around the law. I mean that has been the case with the criminal law for as long as the criminal law has existed," Brandis told the ABC.
"Just because smart criminals might be able to find ways around it doesn't mean that it ceases to be a useful or indeed an important source of investigative data."
He said the laws, which come into effect on Jan. 1, 2017, were enacted to make sure that, as billing systems change, telecommunication companies did not discard the information they have traditionally kept.
"The first point to be made about this legislation is that it changes nothing," Brandis said. "What it does is it holds, it freezes, the status quo."
The information collected, called metadata, will include the time, date and location of each communication but not its content.
The cost of this data retention is estimated to be between 145 million and 250 million U.S. dollars. Brandis said the government would make a "substantial contribution" to that price but any cost would be a blip on the telecommunications companies' radar.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott called the bill a "vital legislation " that would give police the vital information it needed to solve crime.
More than 80 percent of all counter-terrorism, child abuse and organized crime investigations relied on metadata, he said.
The laws were passed on Thursday night after Labor agreed to a revised bill that included protections to journalists' metadata. Government agencies will now require a warrant to access the data of a journalist.
