Newspapers display redacted copy on their front pages in Sydney. Photo / AP
Newspapers display redacted copy on their front pages in Sydney. Photo / AP
Australian news outlets from across the political spectrum, including Rupert Murdoch's tabloids, united Monday to protest the country's encroaching secrecy laws. Newspapers ran redacted articles on their front pages in a show of solidarity, and online and on the air, prominent journalists called for change.
"When government keeps the truthfrom you, what are they covering up?" was the question that ran on the cover of newspapers including The Australian, owned by Murdoch; the liberal Fairfax newspapers; and smaller city and rural newspapers. The question was accompanied with lines of text that had been heavily blacked out.
The campaign is intended to pressure the federal government to change laws that threaten jail time to certain whistleblowers and journalists, and which allow the authorities to withhold information that is often unrelated to matters of national security.
The laws fall under an umbrella of secrecy that consecutive Australian governments have created over nearly two decades. No other developed democracy has as strong a stranglehold on its secrets as Australia. For years, governments on both sides of the political aisle have granted law enforcement and intelligence agencies more powers, and diminished those of its citizens. Australia is also a democratic nation without a Bill of Rights.
"It's something that's been a creeping culture over many years, and that culture is prioritisation of secrecy at all costs over the accountability of public institutions," said Hugh Marks, the chief executive of Nine Entertainment, which merged with Fairfax Media last year.
Television networks including the Australian Broadcasting Corp. and radio stations will run advertising calling on the government to overhaul its secrecy laws.
Despite widespread media opposition to the laws, it has taken years for news organisations to agree to take a concerted stand. But two raids by the Australian Federal Police in June — one on the home of a journalist, and the second on the offices of the Australian Broadcasting Corp. — brought to light the ease with which the authorities could execute search warrants on journalists, and how few rights journalists and their sources had.
"We argue that legitimate journalism should have a defence," Marks said. "The presumption is you're a criminal. The balance of secrecy and disclosure, the balance between what journalists can and can't do, that balance has been redrawn too far toward secrecy."
The heightened determination to prevent terrorist attacks in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks found its way to Australia from the United States, with the government of the prime minister at the time, John Howard, passing increasingly invasive legislation, including a terrorism financing bill, a telecommunications interception bill, and an anti-hoax law that carried a 10-year imprisonment for offenders.
George Williams, the dean of law at the University of New South Wales, said that since 2002, successive Australian governments have passed more than 80 pieces of legislation, purportedly for national security reasons, that go far beyond those of other countries that have higher terrorist threat ratings.
And they go beyond freedom of the press, he said.
Journalists hold up newspapers with redacted front pages outside Parliament House in Canberra. Photo / AP
"There's an even larger number of laws that go to the suppression of free speech," he said. "It's extended to doctors in overseas detention camps facing jail for talking about conditions there."
As part of the campaign, known as #righttoknow, Australian news outlets have highlighted instances when their reporters were blocked from obtaining documents under Freedom of Information requests that bear little connection to national security matters.
The Daily Telegraph, a News Corp. tabloid, referenced stories on confidentiality clauses preventing the publishing of assaults against older patients in care facilities and suppression orders on the identity of sex offenders as examples of government secrecy that had become endemic.
It said its redacted front page was "a bleak warning of a future where laws continue to erode media freedom so governments can cover up information from the public."
The #righttoknow coalition has six key demands at the heart of its campaign, including a review of Freedom of Information laws, the right to contest search warrants before they are issued, the overhaul of defamation laws and limits on what documents can be marked secret.
"What is normal here is exceptional overseas, but people just don't see that," Williams said. "We're almost in this bubble with our own quite unique system of lacking decent free speech protection."
Currently, some federal Cabinet documents can be marked secret for 25 years, whether they relate to national security matters or not. Freedom of Information requests often return to a journalist months after they were initially made, heavily redacted.
"The government has been unable to point to an example where a genuine media outlet" has risked national security, said an editorial in The Sydney Morning Herald, "and we take our responsibilities in this area very seriously."
"But the public has a right to know about abuses of power and mismanagement which, under current laws, governments effectively have the power to cover up," it continued.
A parliamentary inquiry into press freedom, set up after the June raids, will release its findings next month.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has said that while he believes in freedom of the press, no one is above the law.
"The rule of law has to be applied evenly and fairly in the protection of our broader freedoms," he said. "And so I don't think anyone is, I hope, looking for a leave pass on any of those things, I wouldn't and nor should anyone else."
