‘Rigidly flexible’: Peter Dutton’s office directs department to answer media inquiries in three paragraphs
It was 5.58pm on 5 May when an email lobbed into Department of Defence inboxes that suggested Peter Dutton was wasting no time making his mark on his new portfolio.
The email, titled “Media Response Advice”, summarised a request from the defence minister’s office (DMO) about how the department should avoid providing detailed on-the-record answers to questions from journalists.
“Evening Sir, Ma’am, Ladies and Gents,” said the email.
“Defence Media have passed on advice received from DMO regarding media inquiries.”
What followed were several dot points, including a request that: “Responses are to be as brief and succinct as possible.”
“Guidance is to limit responses to three paras, regardless of breadth of the question(s),” the email said.
It suggested that additional information “can be offered on background” – a reference to a practice in Canberra in which a person provides details to a journalist on the basis they can be reported but without direct attribution to the source.
The email indicated requests for interviews about capability – which seems to include Defence’s major acquisitions and equipment upgrades – were unlikely to be approved. In a curious turn of phrase, the email went on to say that Defence should “be rigidly flexible to revert to written responses”.
The existence of Dutton’s office’s request was first revealed by veteran defence journalist Kym Bergmann in a piece published by the Asia-Pacific Defence Reporter on 16 May. It prompted a brief discussion about the matter at Senate estimates hearings.
Guardian Australia has now obtained the full email, only lightly redacted, after making a request to the defence department through freedom of information (FOI) laws.
The sender and the recipients are blacked out because the FOI decisionmaker found “the release of the names, contact details and group email distribution lists could have an adverse effect on the effectiveness” of the defence department’s operations.
Katherine Jones, an associate secretary of the defence department, said the email did not necessarily replicate the exact wording used by Dutton’s office. She told Senate estimates the email “was sent by someone within the department” who paraphrased advice from the minister’s office.
Pressed on who in Dutton’s office had provided the advice, Jones indicated “it was over the course of several communications and it would be with the media team in the minister’s office”.
“In the course of engaging with the minister’s office around media issues, we received feedback in our ministerial and executive communication area,” Jones said. “That general feedback and advice about expectations was then communicated more broadly to the senior leadership.”
Labor is unimpressed with the guidance from the defence minister’s office, saying it forms part of a broader trend of dodging accountability.
“This government tries desperately to avoid scrutiny, particularly in Defence,” the opposition’s defence spokesman, Brendan O’Connor, said on Wednesday.
“With Defence spending $270bn over the next 10 years, the government needs to be transparent and accountable and stop withholding information
from the Australian public.”
In addition to the email conveying advice from the defence minister’s office, Guardian Australia sought access to any emails sent by defence department employees in reply to the guidance. But the FOI decision-maker said no such documents could be found.
Meanwhile, the defence department has responded in very broad terms to questions on notice from Senate estimates about why the defence media unit has changed the wording of its standard email when acknowledging receipt of media questions.
Labor’s Senate leader, Penny Wong, told Senate estimates the defence media unit previously responded to journalists with: “Thank you for your inquiry. Defence will endeavour to get you a response as soon as possible.”
She said that after Dutton became minister, the standard wording changed to: “Thank you for your email. This email acknowledges receipt of your inquiry.”
Wong declared this to be “one of those great passive aggressive lines” that stopped short of a commitment to a speedy response.
It is unclear exactly when the change occurred, but the final time Guardian Australia received the “as soon as possible” formulation was 1 April, and the first time it received the acknowledge-receipt response was 22 April.
Jones told Senate estimates the defence department continued “to respond as quickly as we possibly can to the very large volume of media queries that we receive every day”, but officials took on notice the issue of who had made the change, including whether it was a ministerial office request.
The formal, one-line response has recently come back from the department: “Defence officials amended the wording of the standard response email.”
Dutton’s office was approached for comment about the guidance it had issued to the department but did respond before publication.