Convicted terror supporter David Hicks may find out soon whether the Commonwealth will launch legal action to recover the proceeds of his book.
Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) Christopher Craigie said the matter was still being considered.
Responding to questions from opposition legal affairs spokesman George Brandis during a Budget estimates hearing on Wednesday, Mr Craigie urged patience.
"I suspect that your patience will be rewarded before too much longer," he said.
Hicks' book - Guantanamo, My Journey - was published last year by Random House. Reports at the time said the publisher had refused to outline its financial arrangements.
Hicks was detained in Afghanistan in 2001, handed over to US authorities and detained for five years in the US prison at Guantanamo Bay, in Cuba.
He eventually pleaded guilty to providing material support for terrorism and was sent to Adelaide's Yatala Prison to serve the remainder of a seven-year sentence. He was released in 2007.
For the past eight months, Australian Federal Police (AFP) and DPP have been considering whether they can take action to recover the proceeds of the book.
Mr Craigie said the matter was inherently complex and had been worked on continuously and vigorously by the DPP and AFP.
Senator Brandis said the book had been published and Hicks' boasts of involvement in terrorism were there for all to read.
He said the literary proceeds provisions of the Proceeds of Crime Act seemed tolerably clear.
"I was, as I think most decent people in this country would have been, rather affronted by the sight of this self-confessed terrorist being feted at the Sydney Writers' Festival last week," he said.
"... Autographing his noxious book and selling his book and being treated not as a self-confessed terrorist but as a celebrity, when we have a perfectly good commonwealth law which, as it seems to me, is designed to deal specifically with a very case such as this."
AA