The criticism was clear. “I believe our media laws, many of them, are draconian,” said Anthony Albanese and spoke of the “five to ten years in prison for revealing what could be a mistake by the security authorities”. Just a few days earlier, the then opposition MP, like all other Labor MPs, had himself approved a law by the national-liberal government that provided for such penalties for exposing secret operations by the Asio secret service – and did not exempt journalists.
That was eight years ago. The law is still in force, but Albanese himself has been the head of government since winning the elections in May. And in the country’s media houses, there is great expectation that the new prime minister will change something in a jumble of laws that restrict free reporting like only a few other democratic countries. Australia recently fell to 39th place out of 180 countries in the Reporters Without Borders Index for Press Freedom.
Australia is “the world’s best in the Olympics of secrecy,” said law professor George Williams. He counted around 75 security laws that Australian governments have enacted since 2001 – many of them with dangerous consequences for press freedom.
On an early June morning in 2019, federal police officers searched the home of Annika Smethurst in Melbourne and confiscated computers and documents. The journalist who then worked for the newspaper The Sunday Telegraph previously revealed intelligence plans to intercept Australians’ telecommunications.
Other federal police officers carried boxes full of confiscated recordings and hard drives from public broadcaster ABC’s headquarters the same day. Here, the authorities were interested in the revelations by journalists Dan Oakes and Sam Clark, who had made public serious war crimes by soldiers of the Australian elite unit SAS during their operations in Afghanistan – with facts that turned out to be correct in an official investigation by the army.
Unlike in Germany, freedom of the press in Australia is not protected by the constitution
In protest, the country’s major newspapers all appeared with blacked-out front pages in a unique action on October 21, 2019. However, the investigative proceedings against the journalists were only discontinued a year later.
Unlike in Germany or the USA, freedom of the press in Australia is not protected by the constitution. There are only rather weak “shield laws” in the states, which are intended to protect journalists from having to disclose their sources to the authorities. Another problem for public service broadcasters is that the government can turn the tap on the money: Since 2014, the national-liberal coalition has cut ABC’s budget by the equivalent of 330 million euros, hundreds of employees have had to go.
After all, no Australian journalist has yet been charged under the security laws. Such an indictment would have to be approved by the Minister of Justice – and given the expected storm of protests, none of the incumbents have dared to do so. The situation is different for the informants: David McBride, the highly decorated army lawyer who, as a whistleblower, made the disclosures about the SAS murders in Afghanistan possible, has been charged since 2018 without ever having been brought to justice.
However, the new Attorney General Mark Dreyfus stopped a particularly grotesque trial in July. The lawyer Bernard Collaery was threatened with a secret trial because he and an ex-agent known only as “Witness K” are said to have leaked a scandalous action by the secret service: Asio had illegally bugged the government of the friendly neighboring state in 2012 during negotiations over the sea border with East Timor.
But that was the only action taken by the new government so far that pointed towards better protection of press freedom. A year ago, a Senate committee dominated by Labor and the Greens called for a thorough review of all security and media laws. But so far Prime Minister Albanese has been very reluctant – even in the case of Australia’s most famous journalist Julian Assange: while still leader of the opposition he signed a petition with the aim of ” to bring home”. As prime minister, he has only said that not all matters are “served with the loudspeaker”.