Rex Patrick’s leak on subs may have saved lives

Rex Patrick says blowing the whistle on the leak of the French company that is designing our $50bn sub fleet has made us safer.

‘I was in effect blowing the whistle on the company we had chosen to build our submarines,’ says senator Rex Patrick. Picture: Kym Smith

Centre Alliance senator Rex Patrick says blowing the whistle on the leak of the French company that is designing Australia’s $50bn submarine fleet has made the ­nation safer.

The South Australian senator, who is pushing for a referendum to include the right to press freedom in the Constitution, said the balance between national security and the public’s right to know was out of kilter.

In 2016, Senator Patrick, then a staffer for former senator Nick Xenophon, released toThe Australian’s Cameron Stewart a leak on the combat capability of the six Scorpene-class submarines that French shipbuilder Naval Group designed for the Indian navy.

Naval Group, which then went by the name DCNS, was selected in 2016 as the designer for Australia’s submarine fleet, but the leak raised concerns about its ability to hold secret data.

Senator Patrick, a former submariner, chose to release the information to try to prevent Australia’s defence capabilities from being compromised.

“I was in effect blowing the whistle on poor security practices by the very company which we had chosen to build our submarines,” he said.

“That sort of vulnerability could very easily have resulted in 20 years’ time in a submarine being used by Australian sailors.”

Senator Patrick received the data stick containing 22,400 leaked files by accident in April 2013 when he was working as an adviser to ship building companies. The data had been stolen from DCNS by a former subcontractor in 2011 and made its way from France to Singapore, and then into his hands in Australia.

“I got sent a disc and on the disc was a whole bunch of information about the unclassified training that was being developed. In one of the subdirectories, it blew open into 22,000 pages of documen­tation, predominantly on the combat system on the Indian submarine that had not even gone to sea yet,” he said.

Senator Patrick raised the leak with senior Defence official Greg Sammut, but it was not followed up by intelligence.

“I thought that was a Defence bungle. I effectively was giving them fantastic intelligence information about a submarine that hadn’t gone to sea,” he said. “So the story came out and it caused a lot of changes in the ­Australia-French relationship in terms of security.”

Senator Patrick has called for constitutional change to enshrine press freedom and an overhaul of Freedom of Information laws.

He said it was wrong for Australian Federal Police to pursue News Corp Australia journalist Annika Smethurst for reporting a leak from the nation’s spy agency.

“The media are doing their job. We need to get the balance right on these things. We are not dealing with journalists who are rogues and sitting home alone blogging,” he said. “These are journalists who have editorial oversight, have lawyers looking at stories and are basically responsible people.”

He said there should be penalties if journalists were irresponsible and reported information of where Australian troops may be at the time of a conflict, “but I would argue (there was) almost no nat­ional security implication from (Smethurst’s article)”.