The government’s strategy of deliberately prolonging the prosecution of Witness K and Bernard Coallery for exposing ASIS’ crimes in Timor Leste bore fruit yesterday with K agreeing to plead guilty to a charge of revealing secret information under the Intelligence Services Act.
K is the former senior ASIS officer whose career was stymied by his opposition to the misdirection of counter-terrorism resources from Indonesia, where Australians were being targeted by Islamist terrorists, to bugging the cabinet rooms of Timor Leste in order to benefit Woodside in treaty negotiations between Australia and the fledgling state in 2004. The minister who ordered the bugging, Alexander Downer, later took a job with Woodside, while then-DFAT secretary Ashton Calvert later became a director of the company. The bugging remains Australia’s greatest intelligence scandal and successive governments, including the Gillard-Labor government, have colluded to cover it up.
As Crikey detailed in March, Attorney-General Christian Porter, who authorised the prosecution of K and Collaery, has pursued a deliberate strategy of delaying proceedings. Porter is represented separately from the Director of Public Prosecutions in proceedings due to the government’s insistence that the case relates to national security, and has used his involvement to prevent the trial from moving at anything faster than glacial pace. Porter’s tactics have included last-minute changes and prohibitions, the late introduction of documents that not even Collaery and K, let alone their lawyers, would be allowed to see, and using national security legislation to ban Collaery from instructing his lawyers. Porter’s tactics around refusing to allow Collaery to instruct his lawyers were so egregious they drew a rebuke from the presiding magistrate that “a finger needs to be pulled out to make it happen as quickly as possible.”
Porter has used the delay strategy because of the pressure it exerts on Collaery’s own legal practice — he has refrained from taking anything other than minor cases while he is being prosecuted — and on K’s health. K has been under extraordinary pressure for more than six years, having been placed under surveillance along with Collaery by Labor’s Mark Dreyfus in 2013 (so much for legal privilege between a lawyer and his client), raided by ASIO and the AFP and then having his passport taken and, despite ASIO saying it had no concerns about K, not returned to him (K’s appeal against that vindictive decision by DFAT was halted — conveniently — by his prosecution). Then came last year’s prosecution, five years after the alleged leaking of information about ASIS’ illegal activities.
No information identifying K can be published, but he is a distinguished, long-serving intelligence officer who served Australia diligently over decades, and who served it at great personal cost when he revealed that his own agency had engaged in criminal conduct to benefit a corporation, at the cost of Australia’s counter-terrorism effort at a time when lives were being lost. His reward is years of harassment, the humiliation of prosecution and the full weight of a government hell-bent on covering up its crimes and making sure anyone tempted to expose it gets the message about what will be done to them.
It’s a deeply shameful moment for Australia, and a continuation of the cover-up of a shocking scandal in which those responsible for a reckless and deeply immoral act face no consequences while the patriots who exposed them endure misery.
What do you make of the government’s strategy in the Witness K and Collaery case? Write to boss@crikey.com.au and let us know.
Whilst Labor’s hands are by no means “clean” when it comes to this digraceful eposide, if you wanted one single reason to vote against this corrupt, devious and inept LNP government this is it. If the LNP had a case, it should have run with it. It highlights just how much the mainstream media acts in lockstep with the LNP – I have only ever seen articles about this vile behaviour in Crikey, the Monthly or rarely, the Guardian. If this was the act of Labor, the LNP and the MSM would be shreiking this from the rooftops. Labor is silent, even under Parliamentary privilege, because it knows that it tacitly sanctioned Downer’s actions – in the same way it was meekly co-operative because it sanctioned and supported corrupt behaviour to meet the demands of Packer and Crown Casino. How did that utter weasel Downer ever manage to remain in Parliament; get a cushy posting to the UK on a full Parliamentary pension and continue to exude his pathetic pomposity (with which his wannabe politician daughter is imbued – “they love us because we’re Downers”)?
Beautifully put.
I fully agree. It is a shameful thing to be an Australian these days and watch our governments, of all political persuasions, care only about protecting their own arses and not at all for the rule of law.
Thank goodness for Andrew Wilkie using parliamentary privilege or we would know even less than we do now.
Andrew Wilkie will also be under constant surveillance by the spooks, and living in significant fear of prosecution of some sort by our Blackshirt Gestapo.
It just beggars belief that we did not have the sense to kick this mob out while we had the chance.
But it also pains my allegiance to Labor that they too are mired in this filth.
Thank you. This is so shameful. Witness K must have been under so much pressure. I hope Mr Collaery can muster a defence and, as I have read, express his absolute contempt for them. I really hope he gets support. All of this is so unjust and wrong. Oh, what a corrupt government we have.
Labor had their chance to put this issue to rights, to expose these crooks – and the whole rotten episode to public light – and dogged it, choosing to lie with them instead.
Posted to Facebook, and attributed to Bernard and Crikey. More people need to see this.
I have posted the same to Facebook too.
This is appalling. Thanks Bernard for relentlessly pursuing this while most the mainstream media ignores it. Disappointing outcome but keep fighting.
Not only did Downer ‘face no consequences’ but his career positively thrived in the wake of the shameful Timor Leste bugging. Made a Companion of the Order of Australia, appointed High Commissioner to the UK (another comfy ride on the Oz taxpayers’ teat) & now as Chair of the Royal Over-Seas League. Is there no end to the honours bestowed on this marquess of the Adelaide Hills?
Some idiot once said crime doesn’t pay. Wrong.
Awards are given to the corrupt and the vile with a few thrown to decent Australians to hide the fact that the whole system stinks. When I see an OA next to someone’s name, I wonder which it is. Order of the Arseholes, or Order of Australia. Downer defiantly has the arsehole version.
Given all the dodgy decisions and actions we see at all levels of government in Australia, I cannot imagine what it must be like to live in a country where corruption is tolerated.