Australia’s three largest media organizations yesterday joined forces to demand law reforms that would prevent journalists from risking prison for doing their job, in reaction to police raids hunting government documents.
News Corp Australia, Australian Broadcasting Corp (ABC) and Nine Entertainment released their demands for law reforms following unprecedented police raids on consecutive days earlier this month at ABC’s Sydney headquarters and a News Corp reporter’s Canberra home in search of leaked government documents.
The rival organizations want journalists to be exempt from national security laws passed since 2012 that “would put them in jail for doing their jobs.”
They also want a right to contest warrants such as those executed in Sydney and Canberra.
Both ABC and New Corp this week lodged court challenges to both those warrants in a bid to have documents returned.
The organizations have called for greater legal protections for public-sector whistle-blowers, as well as reforms to freedom of information and defamation laws.
ABC managing director David Anderson, News Corp Australia executive chairman Michael Miller and Nine chief executive Hugh Marks addressed the National Press Club as part of a campaign to gain public support for reform.
“Clearly, we are at a crossroads. We can be a society that is secret and afraid to confront sometimes uncomfortable truths or we can protect those who courageously promote transparency, stand up to intimidation and shed light on those truths to the benefit of all citizens,” Anderson said.
Miller described the police raids that have united media organizations in their demand for change as “intimidation, not investigation.”
“But there is a deeper problem — the culture of secrecy,” Miller said. “Too many people who frame policy, write laws, control information and conduct court hearings have stopped believing that the public’s right to know comes first.”
Marks said “bad legislation on several fronts and probably overzealous officials ... in the judiciary, in the bureaucracy and our security services, have steadily eroded the freedoms under which we, the media, can operate.”
“Put simply, it’s more risky, it’s more expensive to do journalism that makes a real difference in this country than it ever has been before,” Marks said.
The demands come a week before parliament resumes for the first time since the government was elected for a third term on May 18.
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has not criticized the police raids, but has said he is open to suggestions for improvements to laws.
Denis Muller of the Melbourne University Center for Advancing Journalism said the three organizations had identified “real flaws” in the laws and their united front would put pressure on the government.
“If they do remain unified and committed to this, then they will have an effect on the government because we have seen in plenty of other cases that where the media organizations want to get their own way, the government gives it to them,” Muller said. “The government is going to be kicking and screaming every inch of the way with this because they will be getting very severe pushback from the bureaucracy, from the federal police, from the intelligence services.”
Former army lawyer David McBride is to appear in a Canberra court today on charges relating to the leaking of classified documents about Australian Special Air Service involvement in Afghanistan to ABC journalists. The leak was related to the police raid on ABC.
The ABC in 2017 reported on growing unease in the Australian Defense Force leadership about the culture of special forces, and that Australian troops had killed unarmed men and children.
McBride told reporters two weeks ago that his prosecution was not about protecting national security, but concealing “a national shame.”
The police raid on the home of Annika Smethurst, the political editor of Sydney’s Sunday Telegraph newspaper, focused on a story published last year detailing an alleged government proposal to spy on Australian citizens, which cannot be done legally.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion