AFP raids help to shine a light on secrecy abuse

The primary targets of the AFP raids this week were the people who leaked information to journalists.

If cool heads prevail, something positive might yet be salvaged from this week’s raids on the media by the Australian Federal Police.

The AFP spent seven hours searching the Canberra home of Annika Smethurst of News Corp Australia before turning up on Wednesday at the ABC in Sydney, where officers spent another day at the broadcaster’s offices.

The primary targets appeared to be the sources who had provided journalists with government secrets that found their way into news reports. Crimes Act provisions that protect information that governments prefer to keep secret might have been breached.

After yesterday’s press conference by AFP commissioner Andrew Gaughan, the community has a better understanding of the hurdles that need to be cleared before anyone is charged and prosecuted over the reports that triggered those raids. Those hurdles could be significant.

The “public interest” is a factor that is taken into account. If common sense is also a factor, it is difficult to see how anything could be gained by punishing those responsible for these incidents.

In both cases, the leakers appear to have been acting in what can only be described as “the public interest”.

Australia needed to know that forces inside the federal bureaucracy wanted to engage in electronic spying against Australians. They also needed to know that Australian forces in Afghanistan had been accused of unlawful ­killings.

Government secrecy is necessary. No government can operate effectively without it — but it should not be abused, which is what happened in these cases.

The disclosure of these incidents might have caused embarrassment, but they caused no harm. National security was not damaged.

So why was the information that formed the basis of these leaks declared to be secret?

After this week’s raids, Labor’s legal affairs spokesman, Mark Dreyfus, indicated that he wanted the affair to be subjected to a Senate inquiry.

If that move gains the support of crossbenchers — as it should — there is a chance that the real scandal at the heart of this affair could be remedied.

The misuse of government ­secrecy is the real problem. The Senate has a responsibility to track down the officials who decided that these matters needed to be hidden from the public.

Neither incident endangered the nation and unless something more comes to light it is difficult to see why they were referred to the AFP for investigation.

The bureaucrats who made this unfortunate chain of decisions ensured that AFP resources were taken away from more serious matters in order to salve bruised egos.

The real lesson from this affair, therefore, is that free societies will accept responsible use of government secrecy. But they abhor being kept in the dark for improper purposes.

The whistleblowers who brought these incidents to the attention of the media seem to have reached the conclusion that, in both cases, bureaucrats had abused their power. They were right. Everything that followed — the leaking, the AFP’s extensive investigations and this week’s raids — flowed directly from abuse of trust by those unknown officials.

Government secrecy is too important for this betrayal of trust to be allowed to happen again.