On press freedom, in a world that is becoming more and more illiberal, including now the most powerful democracy of all, the message is becoming stark for our own country. When the president of the United States sits in the White House with the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, as he did a week ago, and seeks to dismiss the brutal murder and dismemberment of Saudi journalist and Washington Post writer Jamal Khashoggi by agents of the Saudi government as “things happen” – THINGS HAPPEN – and castigates the journalist who dares to ask the Crown Prince about it, it illuminates just how far the ground has shifted for journalism in the US.

All those massive lawsuits against mainstream media outlets that Donald Trump regards as the enemy, that are designed to intimidate against continuing to chronicle his alarming demolition job on the institutions that underpin democracy in America, are testament to the clear and present danger for a strong, free, effective and independent media everywhere.

And don’t kid yourself it can’t happen here. America was softened up for Donald Trump long before he arrived. Even the constitutional protection of a Bill of Rights and the First Amendment protection for press freedom has been diminished in Trump’s America, and we have no such constitutional protection here anyway.

Six years ago, I highlighted a rare unity of purpose within our industry called the Right to Know coalition to pressure the Scott Morrison government to strengthen press freedom in Australia, after separate federal police raids on the ABC’s Sydney headquarters and journalist Annika Smethurst’s home in Canberra. These raids were widely seen as a clumsy attempt at intimidation after embarrassing leaks of secret government documents.

Nine days later, December 7, 2019, Anthony Albanese, as opposition leader, attacked the Morrison government for its failure to support press freedom. He referred to the raids as reflecting “something sinister”.

There have been two parliamentary inquiries into press freedom since then, with some 30 recommendations for reform, and Albanese has now been prime minister for 3½ years, but still raids like those on both the ABC and Smethurst could happen again, with a not terribly robust hurdle to jump.

Federal police would have to follow some basic guidelines applying to “sensitive” cases; if a case proceeded to prosecution, depending on the nature of the offence it might need to be signed off by the attorney-general.

Not nearly enough. If the government is really serious about this it would include judicially contestable warrants before such raids could take place.

In a 2019 speech, Albanese declared: “Journalism is not a crime. It’s essential to preserving our democracy.”

One test of his resolve would be to deliver uniform national shield laws to allow journalists to protect their sources without the threat of imprisonment. But today, although there are shield laws of one sort or another in place in every state as well as nationally, the overall framework has been likened to Swiss cheese, and despite ongoing appeals there’s no obvious sign of a process to harmonise shield laws.

In 2019, Albanese said: “We don’t need a culture of secrecy. We need a culture of disclosure.” In 2023, his own government’s formal review put the number of secrecy provisions in Commonwealth law at 875. Two years later, there are more, not fewer secrecy offences. Not a good sign.

“Protect whistleblowers,” Albanese said in 2019. “Expand their protections and the public interest test.” We’re still waiting on the government’s revised whistleblower reforms to be tabled in parliament, and if it’s still wedded to the establishment of a whistleblower ombudsman, rather than a strong independent whistleblower protection authority casting a wider net. So we should be seriously disappointed that the government has fallen short of the expectation raised six years ago.

The lives of two whistleblowers, David McBride and Richard Boyle, were upended. One big test of this government’s credibility will be whether a McBride or a Boyle would still face jail under the new laws. Right now, that’s still possible. If these things are not in the public interest, what on earth is?

“Reform freedom of information laws so they can’t be flouted by government,” Albanese said in 2019. But we’re told his proposed new freedom of information laws will have the opposite effect.

Rick Morton, a journalist with two Walkley awards for his work bringing public clarity to the awful truths of robo-debt, and who knows the public scandal from the Morrison years inside out, observed in The Saturday Paper recently: “The Albanese government’s proposed amendments to the Freedom of Information Act ask us to take seriously its proposition that Robo-debt may have been avoided under a regime with more secrecy.”

In September, the remarkable Filipino-American journalist Maria Ressa addressed the National Press Club. Her shared Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 – in her case, for safeguarding freedom of expression in the Philippines, particularly during the authoritarian reign of Rodrigo Duterte – brings compelling authority to the warning note she sounded directly to Australia. With one foot in each of her home countries she’s well-placed to do so.

One of the keys to Duterte’s political success while it lasted, like the political movement that supported Donald Trump into office in both his first and second terms, was his use of social media to control the narrative. Ressa contends that “the greatest threat we face today isn’t any individual leader or one government. It’s the technology that’s amplifying authoritarian tactics worldwide enabled by democratic governments that abdicated their responsibility to protect the public … Tech platforms have become weapons of mass destruction to democracy.” If you haven’t seen her speech, do so, as a priority.

She commends Australia for taking on the digital giants with a world-first under-16s social media ban, but says it was a mistake for the government to abandon its proposed law to tackle disinformation on digital platforms last year. We’ve caught the world’s attention on this. Let’s not stop there.

“The human rights we deserve in the physical world, we deserve in the virtual world”, she says. No one, including Maria Ressa, is saying it’s easy. But we all have to be invested in this. We’re not just sitting on the fence here reporting on a tennis match. We’re in it. Let’s not allow ourselves to get intimidated or derailed by those who would seek to distort the concept of freedom of speech for money and power.

Yes, these are extraordinary times, and we all know I’m just scratching the surface tonight. And yes, I know how much the deck is stacked against good journalism, even in this country, to an unprecedented degree. Yet, here we are, again tonight, celebrating the very best of quality journalism, and therein lies our hope and our inspiration.

After all my decades in journalism I have an unshakable belief in an unquenchable public hunger for news that informs, that feeds our curiosity and fires our imaginations; that stimulates crucial debate and can be trusted. That hunger is not just going to evaporate.

And if we think we’re doing it tough trying to cut through the shroud of institutional secrecy; or trying to call out those who would polarise our communities for grubby political ends; or resisting attempts by government or corporate machines, cynical or otherwise, to dictate our stories for us; or if you’re struggling in a regional or rural community that’s been seriously stripped of its news outlets and the most basic resources, remind yourself of those journalists in Gaza or Ukraine, or Russia or China, or Myanmar or Afghanistan who’ve been shut down or gone to prison, or gone to their graves for an ideal – for seeking to report the truth.

We are all one community of journalists, and there’s something powerful we can harness in that, that we should never lose sight of. That’s really why we’re here tonight. Thank you.

Kerry O’Brien is a veteran journalist. This is an edited version of the speech he delivered at the Walkley Awards ceremony on Thursday night.

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