Secrecy and obstruction stop us from giving you the truth

YOU have a right to know what is happening in the world around you.

But efforts are constantly being made to keep information from you, and to control exactly what we — the media — can tell you.

Police raids on journalists are the in-your-face examples of these efforts, but there are much more subtle tactics used by those in power to ensure you’re only getting the information they want you to get.

A culture of secrecy and obstruction against journalists has affected every level of Australian media, and is present right here in Geelong. We here at the Geelong Advertiser face these efforts every day.

We are told we must pay for information on the crimes happening in our community — or simply go without.

We are told our questions must be emailed to your elected state and federal politicians — who rarely respond to questions on the spot for fear of misstepping and revealing too much.

We are told, too, by large organisations to simply trust their ‘background’ responses to our questions — information to which they refuse to put their names, but hope we will share as untested facts.

We are told by some groups our inquiries are too difficult, and must be gathered through a costly and protracted Freedom of Information process — despite the information being on hand.

Even our local council refuses to answer certain questions, and attempts to discredit the media by shouting ‘fake news’ while deliberately sharing their media responses online after cutting out the questions they’re supposedly answering.

The Addy has requested the same information from the City of Greater Geelong on five occasions over the past five months, and has simply been ignored or refused each time. The request? The number of bullying complaints the council has received since January 2018.

For a council that was sacked just three years earlier, and has been forced to undertake a review of its own processes for dealing with bullying this year, you’d think they’d owe it to ratepayers to reveal just how bad the problem is.

While we increasingly face suppression orders, defamation threats and new legislation criminalising key aspects of our work, it is you, the readership, that really loses out when media freedom is obstructed. Any effort to hinder the media is an effort to suppress information from the public, and to ensure you don’t know what is happening.

The veil of secrecy must be torn down. You have a right to know.

THE ADDY HAS REQUESTED THE SAME INFORMATION FROM THE CITY OF GREATER GEELONG ON FIVE OCCASIONS OVER THE PAST FIVE MONTHS, AND HAS SIMPLY BEEN IGNORED OR REFUSED EACH TIME.”