Journalist Steve Barrett’s push for transparency in DPP dealings
Veteran Sydney crime reporter Steve Barrett spent $500,000 clearing his name against federal police blackmail charges, which were suddenly dropped. Now he wants his own justice.
Police & Courts
Don't miss out on the headlines from Police & Courts. Followed categories will be added to My News.
Veteran crime journalist Steve Barrett made headlines in 1997 when he helped bring down Australia’s most wanted pedophile.
The 60 Minutes producer was with presenter Liz Hayes in room 1070 of the Honduras Maya Hotel when she asked Robert Dolly Dunn whether he knew he was a wanted man. The television crew led Australian Federal Police (AFP) to the child predator in what became one of the most high profile arrests the country had seen.
Barrett’s list of award-winning work over a career spanning 40 years was proof that he was well connected — cops, lawyers, government officials and crooks all trusted him to feed him intel. He was one who could get to the truth and expose wrongdoings.
But seven years ago Barrett’s reputation took a clobbering when he was accused of being part of a massive criminal fraud.
He says all he was ever doing was hunting down a story.
While Barrett was chasing down leads on a potential fraud involving the Plutus payroll, police were also watching and listening to the people he was chasing.
Before he could break the story the AFP made arrests. They also raided Barrett’s house for documents he had obtained in the course of his digging.
But the police took his mobile phones, computer and most importantly, the smoking gun document, the proof the journalist was waiting for to move forward on the story.
As investigative reporter Natalie O’Brien later revealed, the AFP told Barrett and his solicitor, Andrew O’Brien, they didn’t consider Barrett a “co-conspirator” — they just wanted him to tell them what he knew.
But then, in an apparent about-face, AFP officers arrived at Barrett’s front door, 13 months after the raid, telling him he was being charged with conspiracy to blackmail, even though they knew he was a working journalist.
After seven years of hell, going through the court systems trying to clear his name, Barret had all charges against him dropped, but not before he spent half a million dollars — a bill the courts have ruled he has to pay.
“They wrongly named me in court documents, defamed me for months on end and I was not charged until 13 months later,” Barrett told The Saturday Telegraph.
“Clearly they shut down the fourth estate. So then they just went about trying to build a case that never made any sense.”
Barrett said the case had robbed him of around $470,000 of his superannuation. He also had to deal with his bank closing down all of his accounts and cutting off any banking services after he and his wife had been customers for more than three decades.
“The Westpac behaviour is a direct result of the AFP executing search warrants, of which they found no evidence of any money from any blackmail funds,” Barrett said.
And he is “angry and heartbroken” that former colleagues at Nine didn’t support him.
Recently losing his Supreme Court application for costs, he says he now has to fork out more legal costs for the preparation of the case — another $55,550.
Barrett said he wasn’t looking for some sort of “elaborate compensation by the Commonwealth given to Brittany Higgins”.
“It was just an application to get what was taken from me, especially after they withdrew the charge and I am an innocent man.
“I have great respect for the court system, but I am terribly upset a cost judgment just relied on unproven assumptions by the Crown.
“For example, the judgment accepts the Crown assessment that because I failed to do journalistic checks with the police when I was given the smoking gun document, I am guilty.
“How on earth can any journalists, lawyer or anyone do any check when the cops have raided your home and rendered me non-operational. That is very unfair.”
He is extremely grateful that members of his profession, through the Kennedy Foundation, have started a fundraising campaign to help him and his family.
“This has come down to Journalism vs. the Justice system,” Barrett said.
“The destruction of my family has been very damaging.
“I could shake the hands of Brittany Higgins and Bruce Lehrmann, because in their stupid naive actions, they have unwittingly focused attention onto that very dark area of what happens between the police investigation and when it goes to the prosecuting authorities such as the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions.”
O’Brien last year described the shock criminal case laid against Barrett, her former colleague on the investigations team at The Australian newspaper, as “full of holes, inconsistencies, and lacking credibility”.
She said the Australian Federal Police knew it, but that didn’t stop the prosecution.
“Crucial telephone intercepts went missing, exculpatory text messages were not disclosed, and the star witness was a self-confessed cocaine-sniffing, heavy-drinking property developer who told so many lies police gave up taking a statement from him,” wrote O’Brien last year.
THE CASE
Last year, while he was waiting for a retrial, prosecutors dropped charges that Barrett was part of an attempt to extort $5m from members of the $105m Plutus Payroll tax fraud syndicate.
Barrett faced trial in 2021, a week after Daniel Hausman pleaded guilty and agreed to give evidence against him in a deal by the Commonwealth DPP that saw Hausman receive a 50 per cent discount at sentence. The jury was unable to reach a verdict.
Barrett has persistently denied being involved in Australia’s biggest tax fraud and spent every last dime to prove it.
“The most ridiculous thing about all of this is the allegation that I was a part of a criminal joint enterprise to blackmail the Plutus payroll fraudsters of $5 million,” Barrett said.
“It was accepted in the evidence, and not challenged, that Daniel Hausman and Daniel Rostankoskvi, the two so-called co-conspirators of the criminal enterprise got two and half million each. And I got nothing. Zilch.
“Yes there was a payment for $2000 that I did not ask for, but Hausman just gave it to me and wanted me to continue on with a full investigation, so I told him I will have to give him an invoice from my Freelance Company.
“The Commonwealth took out the GST. So part of the Commonwealth sees it as a journalist payment, yet the other side of the government sees me as a member of the mafia or a terrorist.”
Barrett pleaded not guilty to making an unwarranted demand with menace with intention to obtain a gain and has maintained he was chasing a story in line with his job.
KEY WITNESS
After 17 attempts to take a statement the AFP stopped trying, with an officer saying in internal emails “the biggest issue” he had was “the truthfulness of key witness Daniel Hausman”.
Another agent said “taking the statement (from Hausman) would compromise the credibility and reputation of the AFP and place the investigators who take the statement in a vulnerable and untenable position in the witness box….”
They concluded that if they had to give evidence, the AFP would have to say they still considered Hausman “not to be a witness of truth”.
Despite the shocking revelations the AFP pushed on with its case against Barrett, in an era when the AFP went on to conduct a series of raids on other journalists.
Barrett’s barrister Gregory Woods KC previously told the court the credibility of key witness Daniel Hausman had been destroyed when he gave conflicting evidence in subsequent proceeds of crime proceedings, accusing him of telling a “blizzard of lies”.
Hausman in 2021 pleaded guilty to making unwarranted demands with menace and dealing with the proceeds of crime.
He was sentenced to eight years in jail, with a non-parole period of six years.
Barrett’s legal team argued that Hausman didn’t want Barrett to publish a story because it would have exposed Hausman’s blackmail attempt.
Dr Woods said Barrett might have been acting as a “cowboy journalist” but not as a “criminal fraudster”.
HOLES IN THE CASE
In its statement to prosecute, the Crown said Hausman met Barrett at the Four in Hand Pub at Paddington on January 27, 2017, where he saw the TV personality drinking beer and had a hamburger.
“This is where they said Hausman had briefed me on a blackmail plan. It did not happen. I was not there,” Barrett said.
“All my phone records show I was at the Seven Network at Redfern, then I went to Crows Nest, then back to Redfern and then home to Frenchs Forest.”
AFTERMATH
“After court the other day I called on the Federal Attorney General, whose portfolio takes in AFP and the CDPP to look at what changed about Hausman who they themselves described to the court as Not a witness of Truth,” Mr Barrett said.
“I am publicly asking for the Attorney-General to look at the very dark murky world of the cosy relationship between the AFP and the prosecution authorities such as Commonwealth DPP or the ACT DPP.”
“Both Supreme Court Judges and then my trial judge were told the Crown would not be calling (Hausman) because he is considered ‘not a witness of truth’. So what happened? The AFP and the Crown just accepted this serial liar to make up many false accusations and throw people under the bus including me.”
“Let the sunshine in is always the best disinfectant and I now call on Federal Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus to conduct a full inquiry of how the Crown can turn a self confessed serial liar, who they convicted, into an angel witness.
“It can happen to anyone, let alone the media.
“I join the growing chorus for a public inquiry into the clandestine operations of DPP offices around Australia.”
SUPPORT
Journalist and author Norm Lipson said his friend and colleague of 50 years was “one of the most dogged and impressive journos” he has ever known.
“He always wrote the truth and he protected his contacts, he’s a man of honour. What he’s been through is absolute hell and like something you would expect in Russia or Chiam not here in Australia,” Mr Lipson told the Saturday Telegraph.
He said Mr Barrett was “bouncing things” off of him over the story he wanted to break on the tax fraud.
“I was telling him he had a Wakeley award winning story there, he needed some documentation and that’s what he got,” Mr Lipson said.
“Would he really be telling me and the executive producers of A Current Affair about the story if he was involved in the fraud?
“It’s ridiculous and he has been through absolute hell. What has happened to him is honestly cruel.”
The AFP and the Commonwealth DPP have been contacted for comment.
Got a news tip? Email weekendtele@news.com.au
Join the conversation
Cop jailed for stealing $200K cash to fuel gambling addiction
A former Sydney cop has been jailed for stealing more than $200,000 cash to help maintain her gambling addiction.
Read more
Strikeforce cops raid home of nurse in ‘kill Israelis’ video
The male nurse at the centre of a hate speech video filmed inside Bankstown Hospital has had his home raided by NSW Police after he was hospitalised on Friday.
Read more