Australia May Well Be the World’s Most Secretive Democracy
"Australia’s Media Raids and the Decline of Press Freedom Worldwide "Media bosses unite to demand law changes after police raids on ABC, News Corp journalists" "
Craig McMurtrie, center left, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s editorial director, speaking to reporters as the police raided the public broadcaster’s headquarters in Sydney on Wednesday. Peter Parks/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
By Damien Cave
June 5, 2019
SYDNEY, Australia — One journalist is being investigated for reporting that several boats filled with asylum seekers .. https://www.2gb.com/exclusive-up-to-six-illegal-boats-headed-for-australia/ .. recently tried to reach Australia from Sri Lanka. Another reporter had her home raided by the authorities this week after reporting on a government plan to expand surveillance .. https://tinyurl.com/y5hs5uu6 .. powers.
Then on Wednesday, the Australian federal police showed up at the main public broadcaster with a warrant for notes, story pitches, emails, and even the diaries for entire teams of journalists and senior editors — all in connection with a 2017 article .. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-07-11/killings-of-unarmed-afghans-by-australian-special-forces/8466642 .. about Australian special forces being investigated over possible war crimes in Afghanistan.
The aggressive approach — which Australia’s prime minister, Scott Morrison, has defended — fits with a global trend. Democracies from the United States to the Philippines are increasingly targeting journalists to ferret out leaks, silence critics and punish information sharing — with President Trump leading the verbal charge by calling journalists “the enemy of the people.”
But even among its peers, Australia stands out. No other developed democracy holds as tight to its secrets, experts say, and the raids are just the latest example of how far the country’s conservative government will go to scare officials and reporters into submission.
“To be perfectly frank, this is an absolute international embarrassment,” said Johan Lidberg, an associate professor of journalism at Monash University in Melbourne who works with the United Nations on global press freedom. “You’ve got a mature liberal democracy that pursues and hunts down whistle-blowers and tries to kill the messenger.”
The symptoms of what Mr. Lidberg describes as a national illness go beyond the latest investigations, and the causes are rooted in Australia’s history, law and public complacency.
Australia does not have an explicit constitutional protection for freedom of speech akin to the First Amendment. But its criminal code does have Section 70 .. https://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/0833_crimesact.pdf , which makes it a crime for any public official to share information without “lawful authority or excuse.”
That “secrecy foundation” — the law cited in the warrant against the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the target of Wednesday’s raids .. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/04/world/australia/journalist-raid-annika-smethurst.html?module=inline — essentially states that no one in government can share information without a supervisor’s permission. It has been on the books since 1914, just after the outbreak of World War I, and is modeled on Britain’s draconian Official Secrets Act of 1911.
John Lyons @TheLyonsDen Page one of warrant... 2:54 PM - Jun 5, 2019 Twitter
The federal police entering the Australian Broadcasting Corporation offices on Wednesday. Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Defamation law adds another hurdle. Sexual assault cases are especially rare in Australia because of the risks to accusers — and to journalists who cover such cases. The journalists who report such accusations can easily be sued (and lose), as Geoffrey Rush’s recent court victory .. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/23/world/australia/geoffrey-rush-defamation.html?module=inline .. in a defamation case clearly shows.
“That’s more than any other mature liberal democracy on the globe,” Professor Lidberg said. “A lot of countries have amended terrorism laws, but none like Australia.”
The most recent expansion of governmental secrecy came last year with an espionage bill that increased criminal penalties for sharing information deemed classified, even if a document happened to be as harmless as a cafeteria menu, and broadened the definition of national security to include the country’s economic interests.
Even before the law was passed, the broadening of the national security apparatus was causing a stir with a case involving an anonymous whistle-blower known only as “Witness K.”
Annika Smethurst, a journalist whose home was raided on Tuesday.
An Australian secret intelligence service agent, Witness K revealed Australia’s bugging of East Timor’s cabinet room during sensitive negotiations in 2004 over an oil and gas treaty worth billions of dollars.
The whistle-blower had his passport seized in 2013 as he was preparing to give evidence at The Hague, and he and his lawyer were charged with conspiracy for violating the Intelligence Services Act for passing on sensitive national security information — even though the spying on a poor regional ally mainly involved business interests.
The investigations that emerged this week appear aimed mainly at other current or potential whistle-blowers in government. The police have signaled to the journalists involved that they are looking for the leakers who passed on information to reporters, and Prime Minister Morrison said this week that the federal police were simply trying to enforce “clear rules protecting Australia’s national security.”
This is a familiar justification, the same one used by the Obama administration in its cases against American journalists.
But in Australia’s case, the authorities have enormous scope and few checks on their power.
The journalist whose home was raided Tuesday, Annika Smethurst of The Sunday Telegraph of Sydney, had the authorities rifling through her belongings for more than seven hours. At the Australian Broadcasting Corporation on Wednesday, the police downloaded more than 9,000 documents based on a warrant giving them authority to examine phones and notebooks of many journalists that had nothing to do with the articles in question.
“No turf, no terrain is off the books,” said Joseph Fernandez, a media law expert at Curtin University in Perth. “The law is very very wide reaching, and it is very disturbing.”
He added that it was hard to imagine how any of these articles could have been construed as a threat to national security rather than simply an embarrassment for officials and politicians.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison of Australia has defended raids targeting journalists. Rohan Thomson/EPA, via Shutterstock
Take the investigation into the revelation about boats with asylum seekers trying to reach Australia from Sri Lanka. Just a few years ago, the Australian government sent out news releases when smugglers’ boats tried to reach the country, critics noted, but now that the home affairs minister wants to keep such attempts secret, they are considered a threat to national security.
The journalists involved were careful not to identify certain operational details that appeared in the documents they had obtained, and their report mainly highlighted the rift between elite military units and leaders trying to grapple with where to draw the line in grisly combat.
Many of the journalists involved have asked why information from so long ago would be a threat to national security now when Australia has only a few hundred troops in Afghanistan playing more minor roles.
“What they’re trying to do, I think, is essentially send a message to people doing their job, journalists, that ‘From now on, you’re on notice that anyone you talk to, anyone you have text contact with, any digital footprint at all, we will know about it,’” said John Lyons, the head of investigative journalism at the A.B.C., who chronicled the raids on Twitter .. https://twitter.com/TheLyonsDen/status/1136141046860009472 .
The risk, he and others added, is that the pressure silences people who have information that serves the public interest. It might be the teacher who sees children abused, or the spy who has evidence of corrupt colleagues. And some say the ripples could be global.
“Countries with a much worse track record with freedom of expression and democracy, it gives them a free go,” said Mr. Fernandez, a former newspaper editor in Malaysia, where crackdowns on the press have become more common.
“Countries who were looked up to for moral authority are the very ones who are now committing the sort of egregious assaults on freedom of expression and democracy itself,” he added. “They have undermined their moral authority.”
Correction: June 5, 2019 An earlier version of this article misidentified the newspaper affiliated with Annika Smethurst. She is the political editor of The Sunday Telegraph of Sydney and other News Corporation Sunday publications, not of The Australian.
Jamie Tarabay and Genevieve Jia Ling Finn contributed reporting.
Media unites to rally for press freedom, taking campaign to front pages and airwaves
"Australia’s Media Raids and the Decline of Press Freedom Worldwide "Media bosses unite to demand law changes after police raids on ABC, News Corp journalists""
By political reporter Matthew Doran Updated about 10 hours ago
Photo: Front pages of the nation's major newspapers feature campaigns for press freedom. (ABC News: Matthew Doran)
The nation's media companies have redacted their front pages to highlight the constraints on media organisations under strict national security legislation.
Key points:
* Major newspapers are featuring "censored" front pages to show the impact of government secrecy
* It follows a television campaign launched on Sunday night
* Media organisations want greater protections for journalists and whistleblowers
National mastheads, including The Australian and the Financial Review, ran special covers on Monday morning arguing the media is subject to a regime of intense government secrecy and the threat of criminal charges for journalists doing their job.
The nation's broadcasters began running campaigns on air during their Sunday prime time line-ups, depicting redacted Freedom of Information requests and arguing the media cannot fulfil its duty in keeping the public informed if its work is being hampered.
The Right To Know coalition, of which the ABC is a member, is behind the campaign, calling for the decriminalisation of public interest journalism, and greater protection for the media and whistleblowers.
The police investigations were sparked by separate stories published by Smethurst and the ABC's Dan Oakes and Sam Clark, based on leaked classified information.
"We'll always believe in the freedom of the press, it's an important part of our freedoms as a liberal democracy," Prime Minister Scott Morrison told reporters in Jakarta on Sunday.
"[We] also believe in the rule of law and that no-one is above it, including me, or anyone else, any journalist or anyone else.
"And the rule of law has to be applied evenly and fairly in protection of our broader freedoms and so I don't think anyone, I would hope, would be looking for a leave pass on those things. I wouldn't and nor should anyone else."
The Right To Know coalition's campaign argues that without a free press, issues such as the serious allegations of misconduct and abuse that led to royal commissions into the banking and aged care sectors would never have been brought to light.
He told the ABC's Insiders program he could not guarantee Smethurst, Oakes and Clark would not be pursued in the courts.
"I would be seriously disinclined to consent to the prosecution of a journalist where they've done no more than pursue public interest journalism," he said.
"I can't though give anything more definitive than that, because my role in this process is to assess a brief that may or may not come up and a recommendation that may or may not come from the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions [DPP], and it wouldn't get to that point until the AFP had concluded their investigation and delivered a brief if they are minded to the DPP for their consideration."
Media executives asked why they did not raise concerns earlier
On Friday, one of two parliamentary investigations looking in to press freedom heard from the Right To Know coalition.
The inquiry, chaired by Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young, was established after concerns were raised about Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee being given the task by the Government to investigate whether laws it had signed off on were hampering the work of the media.
Labor senators asked media executives why they had not used their news outlets to publicise changes to national security legislation at the time they were being debated, rather than railing against the measures only after the AFP raids.
"Those kind of arguments about changes to pieces of legislation are pretty dry material, in terms of the coverage of events and society," News Corp's Campbell Reid responded.
"But it's also, frankly, slightly offensive to think that the process can't actually be taken seriously if it's not on the six o'clock news."
That sentiment was echoed by the ABC's Director of News Gaven Morris.
"I hope that what we do in this building is think about how laws work and apply them, regardless of whether that's sensational enough to make the top of the news or the front pages," he told the committee.
Kerry O'Brien uses Walkey Awards speech to rally journalists, saying press 'freedom is eroded gradually'
"Australia’s Media Raids and the Decline of Press Freedom Worldwide"
Kerry O'Brien is a long-term good guy, and agree or not with his description of Assange as simply a journalist all should understand that, in all good conscience, the Australian government should be doing everything in it's power to get Assange back to Australia. He is an Australian citizen.
Former 7.30 host Kerry O'Brien has called for journalists to unite to protect press freedoms in a powerful opening speech for the Walkley Awards for Excellence in Journalism.
Key points:
* O'Brien warned about the dangers of restricted press, saying it could lead to fascism
* He said journalists need to call out any abuses of power
* O'Brien also called on the Government to work to bring Julian Assange back to Australia
O'Brien, the Walkley Foundation chair, addressed the crowd of journalists and media professionals on Thursday night, harking back to the Journalism Is Not a Crime campaign in June.
"This year, for a brief moment in the history of Australian journalism, every significant news organisation in this country put its competitive instincts and its differences to one side and united as one voice to stand against an unacceptable step down the road to authoritarianism," he said.
"Authoritarianism unchecked can lead to fascism.
"Fortunately in this country, we're a long way from that yet, but a study of history amply demonstrates how fascism begins.
"Freedom is usually eroded gradually.
"It might happen over years, even decades.
"Its loss is not necessarily felt day by day, but we will certainly know when it's gone."
Julian Assange is no journalist: don't confuse his arrest with press freedom [...] Other documents included the Afghanistan War Logs, the Iraq War Logs, and "CableGate" – a trove of classified diplomatic cables that contained some embarrassingly undiplomatic analysis of world leaders and their countries. So far so newsworthy. P - But Assange went further. Instead of sorting through the hundreds of thousands of files to seek out the most important or relevant and protect the innocent, he dumped them all onto his website, free for anybody to go through, regardless of their contents or the impact they might have had. Some exposed the names of Afghans who had been giving information on the Taliban to US forces. P - Journalism demands more than simply acquiring confidential information and releasing it unfiltered onto the internet for punters to sort through. It comes with responsibility. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=148215354
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