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Australia May Well Be the World’s Most Secretive Democracy
SYDNEY, Australia — One journalist is being investigated for reporting that several boats filled with asylum seekersrecently tried to reach Australia from Sri Lanka. Another reporter had her home raided by the authorities this week after reporting on a government plan to expand surveillance powers.
Then on Wednesday, the Australian federal police showed up at the main public broadcaster with a warrant for notes, story pitches, emails, and even the diaries for entire teams of journalists and senior editors — all in connection with a 2017 article about Australian special forces being investigated over possible war crimes in Afghanistan.
The aggressive approach — which Australia’s prime minister, Scott Morrison, has defended — fits with a global trend. Democracies from the United States to the Philippines are increasingly targeting journalists to ferret out leaks, silence critics and punish information sharing — with President Trump leading the verbal charge by calling journalists “the enemy of the people.”
But even among its peers, Australia stands out. No other developed democracy holds as tight to its secrets, experts say, and the raids are just the latest example of how far the country’s conservative government will go to scare officials and reporters into submission.
be perfectly frank, this is an absolute international embarrassment,” said Johan Lidberg, an associate professor of journalism at Monash University in Melbourne who works with the United Nations on global press freedom. “You’ve got a mature liberal democracy that pursues and hunts down whistle-blowers and tries to kill the messenger.”
The symptoms of what Mr. Lidberg describes as a national illness go beyond the latest investigations, and the causes are rooted in Australia’s history, law and public complacency.
Australia does not have an explicit constitutional protection for freedom of speech akin to the First Amendment. But its criminal code does have Section 70, which makes it a crime for any public official to share information without “lawful authority or excuse.”
That “secrecy foundation” — the law cited in the warrant against the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the target of Wednesday’s raids — essentially states that no one in government can share information without a supervisor’s permission. It has been on the books since 1914, just after the outbreak of World War I, and is modeled on Britain’s draconian Official Secrets Act of 1911.
Layered on top of that are a wide range of measures and court cases involving privacy — a web of legal restrictions that, among other things, keep trials like the sexual abuse conviction of Cardinal George Pell out of public view.
Defamation law adds another hurdle. Sexual assault cases are especially rare in Australia because of the risks to accusers — and to journalists who cover such cases. The journalists who report such accusations can easily be sued (and lose), as Geoffrey Rush’s recent court victory in a defamation case clearly shows.
But none of this may be as significant as the squeeze around national security. Since the 9/11 attacks, Australia has passed or amended more than 60 laws related to secrecy, spying and terrorism, according to independent studies.
“That’s more than any other mature liberal democracy on the globe,” Professor Lidberg said. “A lot of countries have amended terrorism laws, but none like Australia.”
The most recent expansion of governmental secrecy came last year with an espionage bill that increased criminal penalties for sharing information deemed classified, even if a document happened to be as harmless as a cafeteria menu, and broadened the definition of national security to include the country’s economic interests.
Even before the law was passed, the broadening of the national security apparatus was causing a stir with a case involving an anonymous whistle-blower known only as “Witness K.”
An Australian secret intelligence service agent, Witness K revealed Australia’s bugging of East Timor’s cabinet room during sensitive negotiations in 2004 over an oil and gas treaty worth billions of dollars.
The whistle-blower had his passport seized in 2013 as he was preparing to give evidence at The Hague, and he and his lawyer were charged with conspiracy for violating the Intelligence Services Act for passing on sensitive national security information — even though the spying on a poor regional ally mainly involved business interests.
