Journalists should be supported for holding the powerful to account

Freedom to report and freedom from terror are not mutually exclusive.

Freedom to report and freedom from terror are not mutually exclusive. Yet many of the 250-plus comments on a June 17 column here were sceptical that journalists could be trusted to act in good faith on national security issues.

Australians seem not to share the view of Thomas Jefferson, who said he would rather have newspapers without a country than a country without newspapers. While people can make wildly defamatory allegations on social media without fear of legal comeback, there is little trust in professional journalists who must get over high legal bars before publication. I would trust most journalists more than many politicians.

An example? My successor here and now Sky News chief executive Paul Whittaker was raided by the Australian Federal Police at his Gold Coast apartment before dawn in late 1995 over a story that won him a Walkley award for revealing the activities of former Labor senator Graham Richardson in the Operation Wallah affair. The raid was led by then northern division commander of the AFP Mick Keelty, by 2001 commander of the national force.

Later that day he and a team of investigators raided Queensland Newspapers in Brisbane. They searched in vain for evidence of the source of leaks that identified Richo’s involvement with Gold Coast crime figure Nick Karlos and a group of businessmen trying to sell stolen MX missile guidance systems to the Chinese government. It is all in federal Hansard.

The AFP was trying to shut down reporting rather than investigate the plot itself. That night a senior federal minister rang me to make serious threats on behalf of the Labor Party without mention of the national interest. Hauled before the Criminal Justice Commission Whittaker risked jail by refusing to name his source.

An AFP raid at this paper concerned a story in the public interest but damaging politically. Martin Chulov in 2005 wrote about internal reports into the operations of the Australian Customs Service.

The Customs reports were prepared by Allan Kessing, whose home was also raided. The paper never named its source. Kessing was convicted despite maintaining his innocence. Why suspect a political motive? The responsible aviation minister was then deputy prime minister John Anderson, who took up the recommendations of Kessing’s reports and spent $220 million to bolster Customs’ defences against drug and terror plots. Anderson’s swift and correct action showed the paper was right to reveal reports that had been sat on by bur­eaucrats.

After raids last month the AFP assured the public there was no political motive for the search of News Corp journalist Annika Smethurst’s Canberra house on June 4 or the ABC the following day. The timing of two raids on separate investigations was driven only by the progress of inquiries and had nothing to do with the federal election a fortnight earlier, the AFP claimed.

In April last year Smethurst published a story in The Sunday Telegraph revealing Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton’s department had considered a plan to allow the Australian Signals Directorate, which tracks overseas electronic transmissions, to target the communications of Australian citizens. The ABC raids concerned material leaked for a story, The Afghan Files, first published on 7.30 on July 10, 2017. The stories were not connected, did not present any threat to national security and were clearly in the public interest.

How odd this coincidence of timing extended to an AFP phone call on June 3 to 2GB host Ben Fordham warning he was being investigated about a story he ran about people-smuggling attempts during the election campaign.

In the wake of the passing of the Kerryn Phelps-sponsored medivac bill in parliament late last year and warnings a change of government could restart the flow of asylum-seeker boats to Australia, there was a clear public interest in Fordham’s report. Dutton must have thought so too because that week he travelled to Sri Lanka to discuss people-smuggling and on June 20 confirmed to The Australian that one boat from Sri Lanka had indeed been intercepted.

Yet, politics or not, the media’s case has not been helped by overheated rhetoric suggesting Australia is on the path to totali­tarianism because of two raids on journalists. Despite being raided over the Kessing matter, The Australian often editorialised in favour of tough national security legislation and advocated restricting online information and images from overseas terrorist cells.

Nor is tracking journalists’ travel plans and metadata, as revealed by The Sydney Morning Herald last week, a threat to journalism. Before the internet, authorities could obtain a secret war­rant to track reporters’ call charge records. They could find out through Telstra and Optus who reporters had phoned for a story.

Nor are conservative governments a particular threat to the media. US journalists have focused on President Donald Trump’s attacks on the “fake news media”. Perhaps if more had campaigned against the press crackdowns of president Barack Obama they might have more credibility now. Between 1917 and 2009, only one US government whistleblower was convicted for leaking to the media. Under Obama eight were.

Nor do I believe source protection is an absolute. This column has argued there is a difference between protecting a source who provides genuine information of national importance and being used by anonymous political ­sources to produce stories that damage the source’s political opponents or improve the source’s career prospects.

Yet the whistleblowers in the Wallah and Kessing cases deserved better than a police and legal witch-hunt. The corporate whistleblowers who have contacted Nine Entertainment newspapers’ Adele Ferguson deserve better. The Hayne royal commission is clear about this.

Add the failure of the Coalition to reform section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, the hounding of The Australian’s cartoonist Bill Leak and the denigration of rugby union star Israel Folau for stating beliefs most Christians held for the past 2000 years, and something is wrong in the national discourse.

As Twitter and Facebook increasingly are used as McCarthyist weapons to silence free speech, the media should get more support for holding the great and powerful to account.

After all, lawyers enjoy legal professional privilege and politicians have privilege in the parliament. Yet both groups are sceptical of media claims for professional privilege. I would venture more lawyers and politicians have been jailed in the past decade in Australia than journalists.

Add skyrocketing court-imposed defamation penalties at a time of severe financial stress in the media, and there is a strong case for the Right to Know campaign being led by News Corp Australasia executive chairman Michael Miller, Nine chief executive Hugh Marks and ABC managing director David Anderson. They advocate:

● Reform of the warrants regime before police raids.

● Whistleblower protection laws in the private sector extended to government employees, within national security constraints.

● A crackdown on the number of government documents marked secret or top secret when they are not. Miller said the government’s former national security monitor Bret Walker SC also recommended reform in the area.

● Journalists to be exempted from laws that could jail them simply for doing their jobs.

Police, politicians, courts and the public service work for taxpayers and voters. They should be accountable to taxpayers and voters through the media and at the ballot box. The bias should be in favour of the right to know.