Direct threat to democracy

‘National security’ restricts our rights

AUSTRALIANS wake this morning to find major news outlets censored with the front pages of newspapers across the country heavily redacted — a bleak warning of a future where laws continue to erode media freedom so that governments can cover up information from the public.

Key public issues have prompted the unprecedented united campaign. These issues include the government’s potential for misuse of personal data; public funds being spent on political campaigns; issues around climate change; and even the thousands of complaints against aged care homes that we can’t reveal.

For the first time ever, Australia’s leading media organisations have come together in this way to defend the growing threat to every Australian’s right to know the information that impacts their life.

This is not just about media freedom. The Right to Know coalition wants six pillars of reform related to laws that affect the public’s rights.

While the government withholds information relating to aged care abuse; to proposed new powers to spy on ordinary citizens and to the terms of land sales to foreign companies, Australians believe these are matters they absolutely have a right to know about.

Among our demanded changes are reforms to the Public Interest Disclosures Act to afford public servants greater protections including expanding the public’s interest test that currently has a bias against external disclosure; the presumption of criminal liability against media for using the information; and government’s ability to identify sources via journalists’ metadata.

The Australian Federal Police accessed journalist metadata 58 times in fiscal 2017-18. That and the use of national security laws potentially impinging press freedom is currently the subject of the parliamentary joint committee on intelligence and security.

The other pillars of change the coalition of media wants are the right to contest the application for warrants for journalists and media organisations; for journalists to be exempt from national security laws that effectively threaten them with jail for doing their job; a regime that limits which documents can be stamped “secret”; a properly functioning Freedom of Information regime instead of the current one that allows governments to shut down reporting; and reform to defamation laws that have effectively been weaponised to stop reporting of public interest issues. Government obsession with national security has resulted in 75 pieces of related legislation passed in parliament since the 9/11 terror attacks but there is growing evidence they are being broadened to keep secrets unrelated to national security. At a parliamentary inquiry, former AFP Commissioner Andrew Colvin said in the past five years there had been 75 referrals of potential unauthorised disclosures of information and only two raids, including on the home of a journalist from News Corp Australia and the ABC Sydney headquarters. Media organisations believe that is two too many. News Corp policy executive Campbell Reid said no professional media outlet would knowingly endanger lives with disclosures. He said governments, police and military forces often took the media into their confidence, “But the same people keep drafting new laws with the power to lock up the people they are prepared to trust when it suits them.”