The Australian government wants to force tech companies to show that their systems can decrypt communications.

The move mirrors the United Kingdom's recent decision to force communications operators to be able to hand over decrypted messages to law enforcement.

The UK's new ‘technology capability notices’ force operators of communications services to ensure they can give up decrypted data in “near real time”.

The Federal Government says it will pursue a similar path, but doe not have much more detail on its plans.

Attorney-General George Brandis says the government wants to “lift the legal obligations on device makers and social media companies to co-operate with authorities in decrypting communications”.

“Now I should also say of course, that in the first instance the best way to approach this is to solicit the cooperation of companies like Apple and Facebook and Google, and so on, and I think there has been a change of the culture in the last year or more,” Brandis said.

“There is a much greater conscious proactive willingness on the part of the companies to be cooperative but we need the legal sanction as well.”

He said companies would not be forced to introduce backdoors in their products.

“A technical capability notice ... subject to tests of reasonableness and proportionality, imposes upon them a greater obligation to work with authorities where a notice is given to them to assist in breaking a communication,” Brandis told Sky News.

“So that’s not backdooring.”

But the government will not say how technology companies will be expected to break encryption.

End-to-end encryption prevents most companies from being able to simply hand over messages, as the decryption keys are held only by those involved in the communication.

Senator Brandis told the Sydney Morning Herald that one option is to “improve warrant-based access ... at the sender or receiver ends”.

Experts say this may only be possible through compromise of an end user device.

“At one point or more of that process, access to the encrypted communication is essential for intelligence and law enforcement,” Brandis told the SMH.

“If there are encryption keys then those encryption keys have to be put at the disposal of the authorities.”

Brandis said the plan would be fleshed-out at a Five Eyes conference in Canada in two weeks' time.