ABC returns thousands of Cabinet files to ASIO after security lapse

The ABC has returned up to 1500 sensitive cabinet documents after negotiations with senior government officials.

ASIO staff deliver a safe to the ABC’s Parliament House bureau this morning to secure the Cabinet files. Picture: ABC News

The ABC has returned up to 1500 sensitive cabinet documents, following negotiations between the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and senior staff at the public broadcaster.

An agreement was reached to return the Cabinet files, which were being held at ABC offices in Canberra, Brisbane and Melbourne.

The document bundles, which were understood to include classified files related to security agencies, were returned after assurances were made to protect the ABC source.

“The ABC and the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet have agreed on the securing of and the return of the documents which were the subject of the ABC’s Cabinet Files reporting to the Commonwealth,” a DPMC statement said.

“This has been achieved without disclosure of the ABC’s source and by way of acknowledgment of the Commonwealth’s national security interests.”

ASIO officers took custody of a cache of documents in the past half hour.

The ABC tonight confirmed ASIO officers had taken custody of the cache of documents, obtained by the broadcaster after they were left in a filing cabinet.

“The documents revealed a myriad of secret cabinet deliberations and national security positions over several governments,” the ABC reported.

“They were obtained by the ABC after being found in a locked filing cabinet sold at an auction of ex-government furniture in Canberra.”

How the day unfolded

ASIO agents had entered the ABC’s offices in Melbourne on Thursday afternoon, following visits to the public broadcaster’s Canberra and Brisbane offices in the early hours of this morning to secure thousands of files.

ASIO has entered the ABC’s Melbourne headquarters to secure more classified cabinet files. @politicsabc

— Henry Belot (@Henry_Belot) February 1, 2018

ABC News director Gaven Morris said this morning the ASIO action was “not a raid” and the broadcaster had been working with the government to secure the documents since the story broke.

The ASIO move came hours after the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet launched its urgent investigation into the highly sensitive cabinet documents that were discovered in the two old filing cabinets bought at a second-hand shop in Canberra.

Cabinet papers are usually not publicly released until 20 years after their production.

The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet said it had been working closely with the Australia Federal Police and ASIO since the ABC’s “substantive release” of the documents yesterday.

“PM & C have been in discussion continuously with the ABC since this time. Documents were secured in the early hours of this morning in Canberra and Brisbane, and this was the outcome of a cooperative arrangement between the ABC and the Australian government — it was not a raid,” the department said in a statement.

“The documents remain the property of the Commonwealth of Australia. PM & C has instigated an investigation into the circumstances around the disposal of two Commonwealth government filing cabinets that allegedly contained classified material.”

In a statement, Mr Morris said: “The ABC’s priority always is to protect and ensure the integrity of our reporting.

“The ABC is working in co-operation with the federal government and relevant authorities to ensure the Cabinet files are secure.

“ASIO officers delivered safes to ABC offices in Canberra and Brisbane overnight. This was not a raid.”

The filing cabinets sat unopened for some months in the home of the buyer who eventually decided to drill them open. The ABC said the cabinets had been sold at a second-hand shop which stocked ex-government furniture and were cheap because they were locked and came without keys.

ASIO officers lock the top-secret Cabinet files in a safe at the ABC Parliament House bureau. Picture: ABC News

Mr Morris said the broadcaster had been working with ASIO since breaking the story about how it had accessed the documents on Wednesday.

“Once we broke the story yesterday of these files being out there effectively unsecured, we worked with the government to ensure that as quickly and as safely as we could, that these documents could be secured, that there was no question of there being any further threat to national security or to any other cabinet-in-confidence breaches, so this was an agreed process with the government,” Mr Morris told ABC radio.

Gaven Morris.

“We wanted to ensure that as the national broadcaster we were doing all we could to work to ensure the documents were safe.

“The documents are secure on ABC premises. We want to ensure that the government is perfectly satisfied that there is no threat of them getting into the wrong hands or anything else, but equally we want to ensure that the editorial principles of the ABC are maintained as well and we’ll continue to work with the government on what next to do.”

ABC defends decision to publish

Mr Morris defended the decision to publish stories about the documents.

“I think anyone who has seen the stories would recognise that these are stories that are in the national interest and are in the public interest,” he said.

“More importantly than that, the very story of there being security lapses around the containment of these documents, is clearly in the national interest, so we thought that as responsibly as we could be in dealing with these documents, we needed to tell the stories as they were, that the public definitely had an interest in understanding.”

Mr Morris said steps had been taken to ensure that the ABC did not publish or broadcast any stories which breached editorial principles or national security.

“Certainly we haven’t gone anywhere near stories or issues that may have a national security implication,” he said.

Asked whether it was “hypocritical” of the ABC to on the one hand withhold publication of ABC presenter salaries, but on the other hand be judge and jury of what national security secrets are released and withheld from the public, Mr Morris said he could not see a link between the two issues.

“They’re a pretty giant leap,” he said. “What we do is as information comes to us on any story, we assess it for its editorial value, we assess it in the public interest and we do reporting on that story, and that’s what we sought to do here in relation to these documents.”

Mr Morris said the story had highlighted the effect new espionage laws currently being considered by parliament could have on journalists’ ability to report sensitive information.

“Under these new proposed laws we simply don’t understand how far any ramifications from doing a story like that may go,” he said.

ASIO’s early-morning entrance

ABC reporter Matthew Doran was in Parliament House when the ASIO staff entered the broadcaster’s Canberra bureau.

Doran said the ASIO officers had brought a safe to both the Canberra and Brisbane bureaus.

“They delivered the safe and that is where these documents are now being stored. They wanted to ensure that the documents were secure,” Mr Doran told ABC radio.

“Some could say that the horse has maybe bolted with that one, but as part of these ongoing negotiations that are happening between the ABC and the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet about these documents, the decision was made that these documents should be secured in the ABC’s offices.

“So it wasn’t a big song and dance by the intelligence agency as they arrived. It was only two officers and a removalist, I guess you could say, who brought in the safe, but it did happen in the early hours of this morning.

“Quite an extraordinary and very interesting development in this extraordinary leak that we’ve seen of these very classified and top secret documents.”

#BREAKING: ASIO officers enter ABC premises to secure classified cabinet files. This is what happened. @abcnews @ABCTV #auspol #NewsBreakfast pic.twitter.com/lrWssCGuta

— News Breakfast (@BreakfastNews) January 31, 2018

Mr Doran said it was not correct to call the ASIO visit a raid, because it was done with the full knowledge and co-operation of the ABC.

“I don’t think we can call it a raid because this has been the subject of negotiation between the ABC and the department about how to deal with the documents,” he said.

“We also still have access to these documents. Despite the fact that it is a government safe that is now sitting in the ABC’s Parliament House bureau just a few metres from where we’re talking at the moment, we can still access those documents, we can still use them for our reporting.

“It’s more that despite being in probably one of the most secure buildings in the country here in Parliament House, they needed to be further secured because of the content there.

“The ABC made an active decision not to release some of the information that was in these documents in the initial publication yesterday, because they do contain sensitive national security matters, rather highlighting the fact that it’s an extraordinary bungle of security that they ended up in these two locked filing cabinets that showed up at an ex-government furniture depot in a Canberra suburb, so pointing out the nature of the documents, rather than the substance.”

‘Someone must pay’

Tony Abbott says someone must pay for the “monumental lapse”. The documents span a decade across the Howard, Rudd, Gillard and Abbott eras and, according to the public broadcaster, were mostly classified or sometimes “top secret”.

“It’s a matter the head (of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet) Martin Parkinson should be called on to explain because these documents were apparently in the custody of the department,’’ Mr Abbott told 2GB radio

“The department has a responsibility to keep them safe.

“Obviously some absolutely elementary mistake has been made, presumably by a relative junior or mid-ranking departmental officer and certainly someone needs to pay a price. There needs to be some consequences for what is a monumental lapse.”

A PM & C spokesman said Dr Parkinson had initiated an ­“urgent” inquiry but it would be “inappropriate to comment further” because the investigation had commenced.

The ABC said the cabinet files revealed the Australian Federal Police lost hundreds of national security documents in five years and another 195 classified documents were left in Penny Wong’s office after Labor lost the 2013 election.

Senator Wong said yesterday was the first time she had been made aware of the matter, which occurred during a change of government more than four years ago. “As a former cabinet minister who participated in national sec­urity meetings, a senior member of shadow cabinet and a current member of the parliamentary joint committee on intelligence and security, I always take my responsibilities seriously,” she said.

Labor sources said it was believed the safe was not “left behind” but could not be opened and Senator Wong’s office asked the Department of Finance to take custody of it.

The AFP did not respond to a request for comment by deadline.

Labor frontbencher Brendan O’Connor, a former national ­security committee member, said it was a “very serious breach of ­national security”.

The ABC said the furniture sale where the filing cabinets were sold was not limited to Australians. “Anyone could make a purchase,” the ABC reports. “And had they been inclined, there was nothing stopping them handing the contents to a foreign agent or government.

“They (the filing cabinets) were sold off cheaply because they were heavy and no one could find the keys. A nifty person drilled the locks and uncovered the trove of documents inside.”

Rory Medcalf, head of the ANU’s National Security College, said the size and classification level of the documents suggested the cabinets came from the office of a minister or senior official.