…where the CDPP independently considers that there is a public interest in a prosecution for one of the relevant offences involving a journalist, the consent of the attorney-general will also be required as a separate and additional safeguard … if such a request came before me, I would, as first law officer consider the evidence.
— Attorney-General Christian Porter, September 30, 2019
I do not believe that those decisions about who should be prosecuted at the end of the day should be made on the whim of politicians.
— Prime Minister Scott Morrison, October 22, 2019
What a confused Scott Morrison was ignoring, of course, is that there is no whim involved in the police state we’ve allowed to be constructed in Australia. Those who embarrass the powerful are punished; the powerful are not.
The perpetrators of the bugging of Timor-Leste’s cabinet remain unprosecuted; Witness K and Bernard Collaery continue to be harassed and dragged into court.
The very senior figure who leaked an ASIO report to serve the government’s partisan interests, and the journalist who acted as their stenographer, face no investigation; the journalist who revealed an attempt to extend spying against Australians still faces prosecution after being raided.
Apart from being completely confused, or perhaps just engaging in some Trumpesque denialism, Scott Morrison’s tactic for dealing with the mainstream media’s Right To Know campaign is to attack a straw man.
“Whether they’re politicians, whether they’re journalists, whether they’re anyone … there is no-one in this country who is above the law” — “above the law” being a phrase the prime minister has used repeatedly.
Except authorised leakers — politicians, their staff, and senior bureaucrats — are above the law. The goons of the AFP will, as Crikey has noted repeatedly, never investigate them, and if forced to investigate them, will find no wrongdoing.
Labor, however, is all for press freedom and transparency. Anthony Albanese, Tanya Plibersek, Mark Dreyfus and Kristina Keneally all tweeted their support yesterday, while Keneally used Senate estimates to ask questions of the AFP and Albanese asked Morrison about it in question time.
Dreyfus also went on that paragon of media freedom, Sky News, to explain that Labor supported the demands of media groups for better protections for journalists and whistleblowers.
To be fair, Dreyfus established the first protections for Commonwealth whistleblowers when Labor was in government; Labor also improved Freedom of Information laws under Kevin Rudd (and got zero credit from the media).
But Dreyfus also signed off on Witness K and Collaery being bugged and surveilled, and he, like all his Labor colleagues, has remained completely silent about the greatest national security scandal of recent decades.
The government’s harassment and persecution of those two patriots, you’ll recall, involves some selective harassment of ABC (but not News Corp) journalists, editors and producers, and a seeming attempt by Porter to prevent any media reporting of the trials. Labor’s newfound commitment to press freedom doesn’t extend to that, let alone the principals of the matter.
It seems Labor would also prefer people forget its complicity in the attacks on press freedom, and basic civil rights, in recent years.
It backed the establishment of Australia’s first mass surveillance scheme in the Abbott government’s data retention laws, which are crucial to enabling the AFP to hunt down whistleblowers and sources for journalists
It backed extensions of so-called “insider threat” laws designed to better gag intelligence officials who might reveal misconduct or crime within intelligence services
It supported laws that would jail anyone who revealed intelligence operations.
It even voted, despite pointing out what a disaster they were, for the government’s laws designed to force backdoors into encrypted communication systems — exactly the kind of systems crucial to enabling whistleblowers, journalists, lawyers, law-abiding activists and anyone else who has a legitimate need for confidentiality to communicate without worrying about the government surveilling them.
Labor’s role in enabling the establishment of a police state in Australia of course reflects its calculation — quite correct — that there is no political benefit in standing up for press freedom in national security debates. Indeed, when the party has done so, the government’s handmaidens at News Corp — currently masquerading as an advocate of freedom — have savaged the party.
There’s plenty of hypocrisy to go round in all this. But unless Labor intends to revise its joined-at-the-hip approach to extending national security laws, maybe it should keep the embarrassing #righttoknow tweets to a minimum.
The whistleblower in the Timor case only blew the whistle when he started having HR lack of promotion issues with the department according to the Four Corners program but they never fully explained what happened. Did the whistleblower only come forward after he started having the HR issues ?
Is sharman’s claim evidence-based, assertion, or just smear?
When such insinuation, innuendo, allegation, and denigration occurs, first point is that while motive might make a difference to whether we give him a gong for it (remembering that high-ups expect titles as one of the perks of the job), it makes no difference to the facts.
Note that sharman clearly accepts that the whistleblower in the Timor case had a whistle to blow.
sharman has raised the issue of the whistleblower in the Timor case only after the whistleblower in the Timor case blew the whistle. Did sharman only come forward with this supposed issue after the whistleblower in the Timor case started raising the spying issues? Australia’s internal repression agencies being abused to advantage a fossil-fuel transnational is an unpleasant fact, one far more important than the simply irrelevant issue of motive.
Observe too how sharman carefully ignores six years of stress on the whistleblower in the Timor case, and how A-G Christian(!) Porter has so easily given himself the opportunity to pick and choose which journalists will be prosecuted today. sharman raises no issues about the obviously cynical and sinister motives apparently in play in Porter’s decision.
“ Did the whistleblower only come forward after he started having the HR issues ?”
Hey even if that’s the case it doesn’t discredit him,
Someone telling a “truth “ or revealing a “fact” for the “wrong” reasons doesn’t make the “truth/fact” any less relevant.
and p.s. making a claim without posting a link to a credible source, is not credible
They’re hypocrites, we all know and understand that. Simple. Oh, and despite Morrison’s lament ‘no one is above the law’, well, you just need to ask where the federal ICAC is to understand the ridiculousness of that statement. Now, on a different issue, I find your reference to officers of the AFP as ‘goons’ quite unnecessary and offensive. They are police officers with a sworn duty to undertake. Sometimes we (and they – yes, they) might dislike that duty, but bound to do it they are. To use a term like goons is to slander a wide range of professional and dedicated men and women.
What Scomo says shows his incomprehension of the rule of law. Every authoritarian regime has laws, often strong and punitive ones. But so far as the rule of law applies, the laws apply in a disinterested way to behaviour, regardless of the political interest it helps or hinders.
Bernard Keane is right to note the way entirely comparable behaviour gets entirely incomparable treatment, depending on the political interests of the government (and on the toadying dishonesty of the Federal Police).
Discretion exercised according to stated principles, to ameliorate an overreaching law, is bad. But it’s better than no open discretion, or no principles for relieving overreach, at all. Unless, of course, the overreaching law is cut back to its proper scope…
Morrison doesn’t seem to realise that he is now a lawmaker. If he agrees that press freedom is important, he can legislate for it. As if.
Morrison refuses to accept a core principle of the rule of law which is that it be applied fairly and equitably to all. He prefers to agree with that South American dictator who said “For my friends anything, for my enemies, the law”.
Right about now is the time when Albanese should grow a set and take Murdoch and Dutton on with genuine threats to start rolling back swathes of recent Stasi legislation.
He could also own up to Labor’s share of the guilt over East Timor, then start advocating strongly to protect K, Collaery, and most of all Assange…..
these things are absolutely critical if Labor is ever to start breaking the Murdoch/LNP/ IPA/Tea Party stranglehold on Aussie democracy.
Fairmind – even if he were so inclined, I doubt Albanese has the guts to do it.
Unfortunately DF, I think you are right – but it is well past time that Labor starting opening up some major points of difference with this disgusting government…give the people some real options to mull over.
I reckon Aussies are starting to yearn for some genuinely good politics, and it will never come from the conservatives.
Fairmind – I agree. We have scomo but we need mojo.
Fairmind .. you are absolutely spot on with everything you said there.
But unfortunately , Albo doesn’t seem to be the man for the job .
As you mentioned – we have to break the “Murdoch/LNP/ IPA/Tea Party stranglehold on Aussie democracy.”
Problem here is, most Aussies have no idea that the Murdoch / LNP / IPA cabal is the main source polarising our nation .
Albo and the ALP will never stand up to the current fascist filth that are in Govt , unless the people are educated and informed as to what this vile Govt is doing to our country and its democracy.
Time for the ALP to start playing dirty and make the LNP’s 3rd term in Govt a fucking nightmare …
Kudos, Senor Fairmind, by my reading you’re the only one to mention in this presentation and responses he who is rarely if ever mentioned – Julian Assange.
The ‘bipartisan sh**f**kery’ that is Orstrayan political, well, sh**f**kery, will forever be condemned for their failure to a) comprehend, and b) defend, the singularly most important figure in the contemporary history of people’s ‘right to know’.
All the rest of the ‘conversation’ is pure pissant stuff. It’s lazy, it’s intellectually vapid, it’s self serving, and it’s vile.
I can get more straight up reporting, and intelligent commentary, in one night watching (what I call) ‘Vladvision’ (a.k.a “RT”, or “Russian Today”), on Assange’s plight, than I can in a month of f***ing Sundays in the Orstrayan political media and commentariat.
Every freakin’ night, I can watch high calibre journalists, cast from the mainstream protectorate, like Chris Hedges, John Pilger, Afshin Rattansi, inform people of the rancid abuses of international and national laws that are endlessly abused in the name of Yank hegemony, and at the heart of that principled ‘push back’ is the complete and utter injustice being perpetrated against Julian Assange.
The putrid Orstrayan establishment has condoned, nay supported – from the times of that skunk Gillard, the bulls**t notion that this man committed ‘crimes’.
He committed NO crimes – he made available information on those who DID commit crimes, international, egregious crimes.
The nation’s soul will be defined by how we respond to the treatment of this man.
I fear we will come to realise the nation has no soul.
But, personally, I don’t give a flying f***. We are the product of Empire, and seem to gravitate endlessly to the bulls**t notion that empires never end.
Yeah, well, as the looming resolution to the Syrian genocide, the drive for Gulf peace (Yemen, Yemen, Yemen), the ‘plan’ for the North Korean Peninsula, the reestablishment of the nation state of Libya, the support for the citizenries of Venezuela, Ecuador, Cuba, Haiti, Chile, and the list goes on, outside the Western ‘bubble’, the disenfranchised and stomped on are taking note.
And, that’s reflected in the fact that 50 African nations – political and enterprise leaders – have accepted invitations to attend the first ever ‘Russia- Africa Summit’.
Having looked at the agenda – which is extraordinarily busy, a few words stand out. Most prominently, and frequently; “Sovereignty”, followed by “traditional”, and notably “women” and “young people”.
This nation’s irrelevance grows by the hour.
One of the reasons there have been successive Acts of Parliament, particularly since 2001, that progressively erode what few real liberties exist in this country is that there is no legislative protection in the form of a Bill of Rights or equivalent. Australians have been remarkably acquiescent in tolerating this situation. Now the media have belatedly recognised the danger. Too little, too late. In my jaundiced view, Australia will continue to slide down the list of countries that can claim genuine democracy, and they have only themselves to blame.
Gareth Evans tried – https://www.aph.gov.au/binaries/library/intguide/law/rights1984.pdf – but couldn’t pull it off.
More on the history of failure here:
http://www.lawfoundation.net.au/ljf/app/&id=/a60da51d4c6b0a51ca2571a7002069a0
James – Gareth Evans tried but couldn’t pull it off – google Gareth Evans Bill of Rights and you will see interesting links. I tried posting them in another comment but Crikey’s policy of not posting comments that contain links and glacially slow moderation process means that comment and its links may not appear until after midnight.
One link is to the APH (Australian Parliament House) and a second is to the lawfoundation.
James is surely right, but for whom is this erosion of press freedoms a problem? The majority of the population would scarcely have heard of it, even with the united stand of many printed electronic media outlets yesterday. Even then most people would have wondered what the problem is/was.
For them the economic order of the day–now that it is crumbling before their eyes-is much more important, as is the distraction provided by sport and hyper-reality television. There will be exceptions to this, of course, amongst the ‘ordinary Australian’, yet for most the problem of press freedoms and civil liberties do not come within the ambit of their experience or their media constructed world. And it is this complacency and refusal to look outside of a very narrow range of life options that could allow Australia to drift further into an authoritarian state. And the fear this engenders will feed on itself for many Australians, nourished incessantly by the commercial news which seeks continually to create fear amongst the general public by broadcasting every mugging that takes place and using emotive language to describe it.
The gap between the intelligentsia and the rest grows wider, with both main political parties indulging the latter whilst really representing a certain group of the former.