Australia needs to strengthen press freedom laws and promote transparency, inquiry finds – The Guardian

Laws to protect public interest journalism should be beefed up and a culture of transparency promoted, a senate committee report on press freedom has recommended.

Media companies told the inquiry that press freedom and the protection of whistleblowers is essential to democracy and must be balanced with national security issues.

Tabled in parliament on Wednesday, the report has 17 recommendations, including improving the freedom of information laws which often produce documents so redacted they are useless and amending the criminal code to reverse the onus on journalists to prove their stories are in the public interest.

Chaired by Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young, the inquiry was sparked by the Australian federal police raid in 2019 of the home of a News Corp reporter seeking information about the publication of classified material, shortly followed by a raid on the ABC headquarters over reporting of alleged war crimes in Afghanistan.

Last year the AFP ruled out pursuing charges against the journalist, Annika Smethurst, or anyone else for her story revealing plans to extend the Australian Signals Directorates spying powers.

Commonwealth prosecutors also declined to charge the ABC journalist, Dan Oakes, due to public interest considerations.

National and international outrage followed the raids, which were seen as an attack on press freedom, and resulted in assurances journalists will not be prosecuted without the attorney generals consent.

The 17 recommendations in this report show we do need to change some of our laws to make sure we protect Australians right to know, Hanson-Young said.

Covid-19 has shown access to accurate and comprehensive news has never been more important. Yet at the same time, we have also witnessed less information being available to the public under the guise of Covid and national security.

Whether its the government hiding behind national cabinet confidentiality and denying FOI requests, or refusing to answer questions about the vaccine rollout and hotel quarantine, the publics right to know is being thwarted.

The senate report follows the release in August of the report from another inquiry sparked by the raids: the parliamentary joint committee on intelligence and security (PJCIS).

The parliamentary joint committee said media companies should be left in the dark before warrants are executed, but a public interest advocate should make the case for press freedom in warrant hearings.

For offences where national security encroached on press freedom, warrants should be issued by a judge of a superior court of record, responding to concerns that the ABC warrant was issued by a registrar of a local court.

Constitutional law scholar Rebecca Ananian-Welsh, a senior lecturer at the University of Queensland, said the recommendations go further than the PJCIS did last year.

It says, in more powerful language, that press freedom and openness are really important; that government accountability and transparency are really important and we need to do more to promote those things, Ananian-Welsh told Guardian Australia.

And a lot of that is about boosting the things that weve already got like making sure the Freedom of Information Act works properly and there is a culture of transparency, which also acknowledges that there is a culture of secrecy in government, a problematic culture of secrecy.

In a dissenting report, government senators said they couldnt agree to all the committees recommendations because some overlapped with PJCISs, some were already in train and some were contradictory.

In a minority report the Greens called for a Media Freedom Act to enshrine protections for public interest journalism.

The Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance said the recommendations would help to curb the growing culture of government secrecy, stop the persecution of whistleblowers and prevent journalists being prosecuted for simply doing their jobs.

Meaa media president Marcus Strom said the report went a long way to clawing back the overreach of national security laws.

After almost two decades of increased secrecy, culminating in prosecution of journalists for doing their jobs, these recommendations would restore confidence for journalists that they can report on national security issues without the threat of prosecution, Strom said.

Strom welcomed the recommendations to amend the Asio Act, the Criminal Code Act and the use of coercive powers to prosecute journalists under the Crimes Act.

The Human Rights Law Centres senior lawyer Kieran Pender said the public had the right to know what our government does in our name and protecting whistleblowers is vital to our democracy.

As recommended by the committee, the government should urgently reform whistleblowing law, overhaul draconian secrecy law and legislate better protections for journalists, Pender told Guardian Australia.

The commonwealth director of public prosecutions should also review the prosecution of Afghan files whistleblower David McBride, as well as the prosecutions of Bernard Collaery, Witness K and Richard Boyle. These prosecutions are not in the public interest and should be dropped.

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Australia needs to strengthen press freedom laws and promote transparency, inquiry finds - The Guardian