You can’t really go past the media as an industry obsessed with itself. And the AFP raids on Annika Smethurst and the ABC — reinforced by a truculent posturing by acting AFP head Neil Gaughan yesterday — have brought that to the fore. Peter Greste — whose most recent contribution to media freedom was to attack Julian Assange — is calling for a media freedom act to exempt journalists from prosecution in national security cases.
It was like this with data retention: the media ignored the threat of data retention for years before, as the legislation was actually passing in 2015, and kicked up a stink about journalists’ metadata being seized. A “journalist information warrant” process was then cobbled together to provide some nominal protection for the media. Everyone else who was affected by the legislation, however, could get stuffed. There was no media campaign for them.
The list of people needing protection from AFP goons is far longer than journalists. Whistleblowers first and foremost, as whistleblowing expert professor A J Brown noted today. There are greater protections for journalists around the publication of sensitive material now, put in place last year, but none of them protect intelligence officials or national security information.
And the existing protections for public service whistleblowers put in place by Mark Dreyfus when Labor was in power (to her credit, Kelly O’Dwyer established some protections for private sector whistleblowers last year as well) present high hurdles for officials who want to expose wrongdoing. To this end, Samantha Maiden at New Daily deserves credit for keeping the focus this week on whistleblower David McBride, who is facing life imprisonment in another of Christian Porter’s beloved secret trials.
There are other professions that need protection. Think legal professional privilege protects discussions between clients and their lawyers from being seized by security agencies? Just ask none other than Dreyfus (now to be found advocating for press freedom), who approved ASIO bugging Bernard Collaery and Witness K in 2013. Or ask the Australian Signals Directorate, the agency at the centre of the Smethurst raid, which used its forensic military intelligence skills to go looking for the terrorist threat lurking in… Indonesian trade negotiators talking to their US lawyers about trade negotiations.
At home and abroad, our security services are happy to breach legal professional privilege, and not even for anything to do with national security.
Then there are politicians, especially opposition and minor party politicians, who receive information from whistleblowers regularly. We saw with the 2016 NBN raids that being a politician is no protection against being raided, and there’s certainly no protection against having your metadata taken by the AFP. Not to mention NGOs, activists, community groups and contractors who may find themselves under investigation for handling information embarrassing to governments.
A media freedom act isn’t going to protect any of these — just the people who benefit from their courage. As Crikey argued yesterday, a bill of rights would be a far more effective protection for the wide range of groups that want to hold the government to account.
There are two other structural changes that the raids illustrate the necessity of. One is to empower the Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security. Here, both the Coalition and Labor have proved impediments. Last year Labor stymied a proposal by Centre Alliance senator Rex Patrick to overhaul the committee, after the Turnbull government quashed a similar effort by Labor in 2016. A committee that is less under the control of the executive — by being able to initiate its own inquiries and having unrestricted ability to pursue inquiries into the operations of intelligence agencies and the AFP, and which has some crossbench representation on it — is needed to introduce some oversight of the extensive powers agencies wield.
We need a committee that security agencies are afraid of and resent, in the way that US spy agencies are afraid of congressional intelligence committees.
The other reform, perhaps even more crucial, is to break up the Home Affairs portfolio — at least by removing the AFP and ASIO from it. Intelligence officials are worried that Home Affairs is damaging agencies, that a poison is seeping into them from a portfolio that has contempt for basic freedoms, and which — as the Pezzullo-Moriarty correspondence exposed by Smethurst revealed — wants to expand further into security agencies not already within it.
That contempt was on vivid display yesterday in the threats of Gaughan to prosecute journalists. That’s the toxic influence of Home Affairs wafting into our national police force. And, unchecked, it’s going to get a whole lot worse.
This is about so much more than just journalism.
Agree with all of that, well put, but boy oh boy haven’t these raids activated the media to a civil rights agenda! Next we’ll have the Parrot arm in arm with Mike Carlton arm in arm with Andrew Bolt manning the barricades
It might not be just about journalists, but who do whistleblowers turn to when their concerns are dismissed arbitrarily?
You guessed it, journalists. So when journalists are silenced, the Police State thrives and secrets and lies become the norm.
Naah ,you old Sleuth you …the days of journalists being the prima donna 4th estaters’ are over ..They might still have a minor role to play on the sidelines in the wings..Julian Assange played a far greater role than many a million hack has ever played ..They’ll be far more permutations & combinations ‘Julian Assanges’ ‘.,,This serious charade of cops n robbers are caught up in playing a footy match of credentialism against each other ..The internet has superseded the invention of the wheel/printing press ..Even the knowledge classes are going to be hard pressed to keep up keeping a handle on it..
I think you’re pretty well spot on.
Bang on it, Ruby.
For every one legitimate ‘public interest’ leak from a ‘brave whistleblowing source’ published by our ‘fearlessly independent free press’, there are now about 1000 daily cynical anonymous feeds of partisan inside spin, dutifully aerated and amplified and circulated and turned into ‘today’s news’ by the brain-dead sausage machinery of lazy and/or careerist hacks, absolutely none serving the ‘public interest’ at all. Yet all claim the same right to the same ‘protection of sources’ principle, whether it’s a genuine public interest yarn – or just part of some grubby Skynews tilt at toppling an elected PM, or a nasty attempt by the Tele to discredit a blameless witness in a losing defo case, or the latest pile-on-the-Catholic-Church prog left obsessing from Aunty. A ‘source’ tells me…according to ‘a source inside the government’…’a senior figure’…oh, yawn yawn yawn. Might as well just clean make it up, kids. Lots of you do just that too, of course.
The misuse of ‘leaks’ is now so rife at the professional pollie-meeja interface that only a moron pays the slightest attention to any ‘whistle-blowing’ done via the latter route. You just assume it’s yet more agenda-driven, mutually beneficial insider game-playing. (You give my power/career/info-status a tickle/nudge, I’ll tickle/nudge yours back.) That’s a huge loss for us all, but the Fourth has only itself to blame. Since it was hijacked by over-ambitious middle class info-mediocrities driven mostly by the desire to be reality TV stars/novelists, its capacity to police its own definitive vocational principles has collapsed. A principle like ‘protect your source’ is only as legitimate as your collective collegiate ability and willingness to ring-fence it from charlatans, partisans, spoilers…inside players and their games. Unfortunately we’re way beyond hope of that.
So it’s like Ruby says: If you were a whistleblower today the Professional Meeja is about the very last place you’d go. Why on earth would you take your stewardship of the ‘public interest’ to that self-interested crew?! You might as well just leak into the loo. The ‘professional journalist’ of a dying-throes vocation may take great pleasure in sneering at the Internet as exactly that…but at least hereabouts, we punters can decide which turds to flush, and which to poke a wee bit more closely, entirely for ourselves.
Journalists, editors & producers at large media organisations have already stopped reporting! One editor told me in person “the stakes are high”, and a current affairs tv producer stated “we don’t have the resources to investigate large scale corruption”.
The Egyptian security state, much like ours, must be laughing their sox off at DFAT for blowing so much diplomatic credit on Greste. Doubly so when they look towards London’s supermax prison.
When he spoke, AFP acting commissar Gaughan’s voice and attitude sounded eerily like a front row forward for a third rate rugby team.
I thought it sounded like a pubescent boy, being asked about the pornography on his computer.
Bright red face, eyes downcast, shuffling from foot from foot and wishing that the earth would swallow him.
Australians in general have yet to realise how their rights have been eroded by successive LNP AND Labor governments. Why didn’t Labor ever remove honest John’s sedition provisions?
Australians have also yet to realise how deeply entrenched corruption in government is and how the emasculation of FOI provisions and the ramping up of the protection of ‘national security’ has served to hide the extent of corruption and protect those who intentionally or otherwise have enabled it.
Security classification is necessary at some level but it has been used to hide wrongdoing and rorting of the system for decades. The classic trick is to get a security classification on a budget so that it can’t be checked except by someone with the right level of clearance and if they are in the know and in the game you are off and running.
Now the powers that be have the chance to hit back at those who would dare pry watch out.
The lack of awareness of issues such as these and the lack of action that results imperil our freedom but do enough people really care?
Don’t know? Or don’t care. It seems to me that since Howard we don’t see that the right wing are corrupt. We voted for him in the face of lies, treachery and incompetence.
Quite so Unimpressed. Both majors have conflicted interest on this as it serves them during their turn term. Why are so many things secret or classified or whatever ? Why should people be punished for revealing these secrets to voters ?
However the secret trials of ATO whistleblowers is the tip of the iceberg. The real problem is the secret interrogation laws. Right now possibly thousands could be either being secretly interrogated and held without charge, or having been so, permanently prohibited from disclosing this to anyone. It was only the insistence of Lleyonhelm that stopped such a clause in the reinstated ABCC. The imperative is to repeal these secrecy provisions in all laws. What purpose do they serve except to shield cops and spooks from accountability.