Fighting for Press Freedom in Australia
Echoes of The Moonlight State
by Nance Haxton
Recent raids by the Australian Federal Police on journalists are raising questions about whether the separation of state, police and judiciary is under threat in Australia.
In June, the Australian Federal police raids on News Corp reporter Annika Smethurst and ABC journalists Dan Oakes and Sam Clark triggered a major debate over press freedom.
Those raids were the latest in a series of trends that have made internationally renowned journalists such as Peter Greste increasingly uneasy.
“Clearly Australia is not Egypt, and not about to become Egypt anytime soon, but, and there is a but here, if you think about what happened to us in the abstract, where the government used national security legislation and framed it so loosely that it could be interpreted in a way that criminalised what would normally have been considered as legitimate journalism, then we’re seeing actually the same kinds of trends taking place here in Australia,” Peter tells me on The Journo Project podcast.
“Ever since 9/11, Australia has passed more than 70 pieces of national security legislation, more than any other country on earth, and a lot of those are so loosely drawn that they criminalise legitimate journalism.
“This is not an abstract idea…So even though Australia and Egypt are two very different places, the political trends, the political imperatives which are driving and increasing security stays, and in the process, limiting press freedom, limiting journalistic freedom, limiting freedom of speech and civil liberties, are the same, the same imperatives are there. So understanding that has actually made me feel quite concerned.”
At the time of the raids I started my new podcast The Journo Project (on iTunes, Spotify and Soundcloud), which quickly became an important outlet for journalists such as Peter Greste to raise their concerns about why media freedoms in Australia shouldn’t be taken for granted. I wanted to celebrate great journalists and great reporting, in the face of increasing attacks on the Australian media.
Other journalists to take part in The Journo Project include last year’s Gold Walkley winner and renowned investigative reporter Hedley Thomas, creator of the phenomenally successful podcast The Teacher’s Pet which has been downloaded more than 50 million times around the world.
He says we should all be concerned about the implications of the AFP raids on ABC and News Limited journalists.
“My view is that it was significantly about intimidating would be whistleblowers, who will be seeing the very public spectacle of police going in en masse to the offices of the National Public Broadcaster, and into the home of one of my colleagues at News Corp,” he says.
“And the coverage of that, has a chilling effect on people who know that bad things are happening, or being covered up, that need to be highlighted in the media.
“It was over the top. It was, I think, a very concerning spectacle, and the timing just after the election, please. I mean, seriously? Given the length of these cases, how that could be just coincidence, and not related to the election? No, I’m sorry, I don’t buy that.”
Eight time Walkley Award winner Adele Ferguson says she is also concerned by these recent developments, which highlight that whistleblowers deserve more protection in Australian society.
“It’s frightening because it just has a chilling effect on whistleblowers speaking up, you know, and the impact on the journalists and the organisation, it’s just horrendous,” Adele says.
“We have to campaign. I think having the three CEOs on the panel at the National Press Club a few weeks ago, backing independent journalism and whistleblowers and press freedom was a really good start because when different media organisations unite, politicians get very worried.
“The laws do not protect whistleblowers. It’s just shocking. In America, they have a whistleblower day. They get rewards.
“Here, they’re seen as snitchers and troublemakers and they’re punished.”
Griffith University Media and Culture Professor and publisher of Griffith Review Julianne Schultz says press freedoms have been slowly eroded for decades, and need to be wound back for the good of society.
“I think it’s been building for a long time, but as is the way for people involved in the media, it’s the immediacy of an event which helps to focus something so that when the AFP raids happened, it provided a perfect filter through which to view this,” she says.
“I think the signal that it sent was that this was a government that was going to allow this sort of degree of supervision and surveillance to occur in a way that we haven’t previously expected.
“I thought it was particularly interesting in relation to the ABC raid that the stories which were allegedly such a threat to national interest remained up on the website as the raids were going on.
“If the threat to national security was so great that you needed to go through this process, surely the stories themselves were ones which should have been not available to people to read.
“I know it’s part of a bigger legal process but that seemed to me to send a sort of particular chilling signal.”
She agrees with Peter Greste that the sheer volume of surveillance and security legislation passed in Australia in recent years is a matter of great concern.
“I think the biggest thing is that what we’ve seen since 9/11 has been a rapid increase in surveillance and security legislation. So Australia has some of the most extensive security and surveillance legislation in the world,” Julianne says.
“You want to make sure that your country and people are safe. I think though that what’s happened is that this legislation has been much, much more extensive. I mean it’s hard to judge from the outside, but it’s also set up a climate in which this is the norm, that the norm is to surveil, the norm is to intrude.
“What we’ve seen is the rise of much greater surveillance, much greater intervention in the political and social process.”
One of her greatest concerns is Australia’s lack of legislative backing for the right of the media to report.
“It’s not just media freedom. I mean the fact that we don’t have a constitutional bill of rights is at the core of this,” she says.
“Our acceptance of the freedom of political speech in the (Australian) media is an implied acceptance. It’s something which the High Court only ruled on in the 1980s. It is not something which is longstanding. It’s not been there since the beginning of the federation.
“So while everyone walks around now saying, “Oh yes, this, we’ve got a democratic right, we’ve got a constitutional right to this.” Actually, it’s very flimsy. Why are you depending on one high court ruling and then the ones that have followed it to establish that principle? It’s not robust.
“And so it makes it much easier for a state which is concerned about external threats to just slowly accrete more and more power. And I think that that’s what we’ve seen over this last little while.”
Three decades after the 4 Corners expose The Moonlight State, the revelations of which brought down Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen and ultimately the Queensland government, some are asking whether anti-terrorism laws and a growing acceptance of surveillance as the norm could take us back to those dark days.
“When you put it into a sort of Queensland context, the experience that those of us who experienced Queensland during the Joh (Bjelke-Petersen) years, grew up with the understanding of how it was a sort of authoritarian state,” she says.
“It was an authoritarian state where the barriers between the politics, the police and the judiciary were collapsed.
“And the media was actively caught up in that.
“There was a big push back against that. There was a lot of effort to try and reassert the right of the parliament. To make sure that the parliament was independent of the government of the day, to make sure that the police and the judiciary had proper oversight, to give a bit of space for journalism and the media to do what they should be doing.
“I think what we’re seeing now is that the collapsing of those barriers and partly it’s happening through the national security legislation, partly it’s happening because we’ve entered into an era that I am persuaded by, it’s a new form of surveillance capitalism.
“So that separation that we’ve become accustomed to as part of our rights regime is being eroded. So that’s happening in a commercial space and it’s happening in a political space. That the journalism gets pulled into it, is to be expected because that’s going to be the point where that intersection happens.”
She says a coordinated response is needed to protect media freedoms in this country.
“To start arguing about what are the rights that we as citizens actually want going into the 21st century,” Julianne says.
“We haven’t even adopted the bill of rights that was developed after the Second World War, 70 odd years ago.
“Australia was one of the founding countries arguing for that international declaration of human rights. We’ve not adopted that. We’ve adopted various protocols, but we’ve not adopted the core thing.
“And so I think that now we need to be thinking, “Well, what are the rights that we would need to have in a 21st century?”
She says this is particularly important as with digital disruption of the media industry slashing jobs in newsrooms.
“Over the last decade we’ve seen the drop in the number of journalists by about a third,” she says.
“We’ve seen the collapse in the number of publications. We’ve seen a real contraction in this space, really active contraction, that the focus has been on the business model.
“What’s the business model that’s going to be appropriate? And I think a lot of journalists inadvertently got drawn into that conversation.
“It was always a business that was done on a trade, and that trade required a certain independence and it required a certain profitability to maintain that independence.
“So we have to move it from that commercial conversation to one, which is about what the purpose of this is, and journalists are part of that.”
Peter Greste is now the UNESCO Chair in Journalism and Communications, and director of The Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom. He’s very concerned about the gradual erosion of media freedom in Australia, and says journalists need to get better at arguing why a robust Fourth Estate is vital to a healthy democracy.
“If we asked Australians, `Hands up those of you who would feel perfectly comfortable without a free press. Who thinks that all we need to run our democracy, all we need about the information about what takes place inside government are the Facebook posts and Twitter feeds of our politicians and senior civil servants. Hands up who is comfortable with that idea?’. I don’t think you’d see too many hands,” he says.
“I think most people would understand that even though the media works imperfectly, even though they don’t trust us a lot of the time, for reasons that I completely understand, the alternative is a good deal worse.
“That’s what we need to argue for. We need to recognise the importance of news as a public good. We need to understand and remember why it matters to our democracy.
“So what we need to be thinking about is what we need from our journalism. We need to think about what our journalism has to provide in a functioning democracy.
“I think we’ll come closer to a kind of conversation that we need to have to deliver good journalism and journalism that is sustainable over the long term.”
Dual Walkley Award winner and author Trent Dalton has a profound respect for journalism, saying it was the apprenticeship he needed to write his first worldwide successful novel, Boy Swallows Universe.
He wants others in society to better understand the importance of the media to society.
“It’s that terrifying notion, that Orwellian notion that gets back to those fundamental reasons why Steinbeck wrote and why Orwell wrote, is they were going for truth. And these raids stand at the heart of truth,” he says.
“I’m talking big picture, philosophical, what is at the heart of this? It is, there is a truth that they are trying to get at, and we are trying to get out. And they’re trying to hide it, and we are trying to get at it.”
Channel 10 political editor and ABC Radio National presenter Hugh Riminton says it is clear the AFP raids were intended to intimidate not just journalists, but whistleblowers as well.
“The primary purpose is to intimidate whistleblowers. And what we have to understand here is that we have a situation where people who find information out, that is really damaging to our fellow citizens. If they blow the whistle on it, they get punished,” he tells me on The Journo Project podcast.
“They might use the media to get it out, but they get punished. There are court cases at the moment where people are facing long periods of time in jail. A tax officer who revealed appalling practices within the tax office is now facing 160 years potentially in jail. And having gone public with it, they’ve had to change the way the tax office works. He did a good thing for the country and he risks going to jail.
“And all of these things are in the public interest to know how our government works, and that they’ve got a mechanism in place that will jail people for years for doing good things for the country and then harass and intimidate journalists.
“Everyone should be aware that, when people in good faith find out things that are wrong about the way things are operating, they have to be allowed to speak up for the good of the country and not face going to jail at the behest of some really unattractive bullies that we’ve allowed to take positions of power in this country.”
Griffith University Professor of Journalism and Social Media Mark Pearson specialises in media law.
He says the most recent raids are only the most recent example of police powers being put to the test.
“While this has been regrettable, it is not absolutely new,” he says.
“There were raids on the ABC only in Brisbane, only in the last couple of years to do with a state cabinet documents matter.
“The AFP raids were surprising, I suppose, the boldness of it.
“From ’04, ’05 I was recording occasional raids on journalists over their work. I recall one on Phillip Dorling at Canberra at one stage, one on the National Indigenous Times office at one stage, all to do with sources and confidential information.
“So it’s not new, but it is concerning and it’s even more concerning because of all of the new powers.
“It’s one thing to have the power to raid a premises. It’s quite another to also have the power to access the telco’s metadata as well, and you start to get these powers coming into alignment, which really make both journalists and their sources much more wary of entering into that relationship.”
He says the distinctions between the government, the police, and the judiciary are becoming increasingly blurred.
“Oh, very much so and I’ve recently helped the Journalism Education and Research Association do their submission to the parliamentary inquiry, the committee looking into this,” he says.
“With these laws, the criminalising of journalism through the holding and dealing with data that we’ve found through this AFP situation, we’re also seeing internationally with the Assange Wikileaks situation, it seems that in Western democracies the value of fourth estate journalism has become markedly eroded.
“It’s important that the media has some fundamental protections and at the moment we only have a very ambiguous High Court series of rulings that give some implied freedom to communicate on matters of politics and government and it’s far short of a First Amendment protection that they have in the United States.
“It needs a federal initiative to scour through all of these and to pull the state Attorney Generals together and to say, “Look, let’s get some uniformity with a solid public interest journalism exemption.” Now the exemption is normally a discretion of some sort. Blatant, irresponsible journalism would not be exempted.”
Renowned ABC investigative journalist Mark Willacy says the lack of basic protections for media freedom have wide implications beyond journalism practice, also impacting on democracy in Australia.
“We’re one of the few democracies that don’t have freedom of the press enshrined in some form of constitutional right or Bill of Rights, and that, to me, is a worry, because politicians, even the most shrill authoritarian versions of them, I think admit the press play an important role,” he says.
“How would they even get their message out without a free press?
“I think it’s time for this debate to happen in Australia that maybe we need to enshrine freedom and independence of the press officially in our constitution or in a Bill of Rights of some form.
“Chris Masters, when he exposed police corruption on The Moonlight State Four Corners program in 1987, I think showed that was our greatest piece of journalism committed in this state and it led to major change in this state, political, justice, law and order. It really changed this state.
“I think we can never take our freedoms for granted and I think the media needs to keep reminding people what those freedoms are and why we need to keep fighting for them.”
He says investigative journalists are having to dust off some of their older methods as well as being across the latest digital technologies, to better protect sources in this environment.
“If we want to give sources 100% confidentiality, we have to also teach our sources what to do with their technology, so, for example, the use of Signal or WhatsApp. But we’re even sort of investigating better technology or more safe technology than that,” he says.
“For example, when I go to meetings with sources who I know are going to give me something, I leave my phone behind. That way if there was ever an investigation, my phone and the source’s phone aren’t going to be in the same spot.”
As Peter Greste optimistically says, despite this era of digital disruption and job cutbacks, there is hope for the future of journalism.
“If we prioritise only those stories which are popular, then we’ll only end up with the McDonald’s of news. Now we all know that if all we consume is McDonald’s, we’ll end up with diabetes. So you got to eat your greens, you got to have your spinach, you got to have some salads and some broccoli from time to time,” he says.
“It’s okay for some McDonald’s from time to time, that’s great. We all love it, we all need it, there’s nothing wrong with it. But you’ve also got to have a balanced diet. The same goes for our news.
“That’s what we need to argue for. We need to recognise the importance of news as a public good.
“We need to understand and remember why it matters to our democracy.
“It’s easy for us to get a bit depressed and grim about it all. But I also think it’s worth reminding ourselves of something really fundamental, that from the moment that humans have had the capacity to speak, we’ve had storytellers, we’ve had people, whether they’re bards or wandering minstrels or storytellers or journalists.
“We’ve always needed people to go out to gather stories of the world around us, to help us understand and make sense of the world, to keep us up-to-date with what’s taking place around our own little social sphere, and we will always need them.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
NANCE HAXTON
Nance Haxton has proven her excellent reporting track record over more than 20 years — winning Australian journalism’s most prestigious honour — a Walkley Award — for the second time in 2012.
Nance, formerly a journalist for ABC’s Radio’s flagship radio current affairs programs AM, PM and The World Today. She now works as a podcast producer at Griffith University and publishes as The Wandering Journo.
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