Public interest be damned
Kaye Lee
The notion of “public interest” has been officially abandoned. The interests of the government are now paramount and they intend to keep a very tight control on information whilst being selectively ruthless about who they pursue.
In 2006, Lateline aired a program called Sexual slavery reported in Indigenous community in which an unnamed youth worker made sensational allegations – except it turned out he was actually a public servant who was working for Mal Brough. The “evidence’ was shown to be false though not before allowing Brough and Howard to instigate the NT Intervention.
Tjanara Goreng Goreng, an Aboriginal woman who became a whistleblower in debunking the story, had her home raided by Australian Federal Police. She was subsequently prosecuted and convicted for releasing Commonwealth information, and bankrupted as a result of a substantial legal bill.
Gregory Andrews, the Brough adviser who lied on national television with such devastating consequences for Indigenous communities, was given a job as CEO for the government-funded Indigenous Community Volunteers before being appointed as the Abbott Government’s new ‘Threatened Species Commissioner’.
When a whistleblower revealed the illegal conduct of the Australian government in bugging the parliamentary offices of officials in Timor l’Este to gain commercial advantage, his passport was confiscated to stop him testifying at the Hague and Brandis is seeking to prosecute both the whistleblower and his lawyer.
In 2014, the university student who helped expose a secret scholarship awarded to Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s daughter Frances Abbott faced jail time for hacking work computers to expose that the Prime Minister’s daughter paid just over $7,000 for her $68,000 degree, and received the scholarship after just one meeting with Whitehouse Institute owner Leanne Whitehouse.
The judge accepted that twenty-one-year old Freya Newman was “motivated by a sense of injustice” and put her on a two year good behaviour bond.
Also in 2014, Scott Morrison suggested that Save the Children workers on Nauru had orchestrated a campaign to undermine the Government’s offshore detention policy and summarily sacked them. He then launched an investigation that found that there was never any evidence of reliable information on which to base the actions taken by the department. In fact it went further and found that “the decision maker did not act in good faith.”
There were also the shameful attacks on Gillian Triggs for drawing attention to the plight of children in detention – attacks which Australia’s peak law bodies and academics called a threat to democracy.
When a Labor Senator starts asking uncomfortable questions about the rollout of the NBN, the AFP decides to raid his office and the homes of his staffers, allowing confidential documents to be photographed and leaked to the complainant.
But if you are Mal Brough, Wyatt Roy, Christopher Pyne, James Ashby or Karen Doane, carry on undeterred. (It will be interesting to see if the recent decision to allow the police to use Ashby’s phone records sees any progress on a case which should have been finished years ago.)
If you are leaking national security documents, don’t be worried. All things defence are OK to talk about. With the possible exception of Stuart Robert, the assistant minister who took his mate to China pretending he was representing the government to help him win a contract, the MP who used his ‘fundraising body’ to donate towards the campaign of supposedly ‘independent’ local councillors, the guy the AFP are ‘looking into’, the guy who will recontest the seat of Fadden at the next federal election.
Whilst Peter Slipper has had his life destroyed, Bronwyn Bishop will not be investigated further.
As Craig Thomson continues to lurch from one court case to the next, Justice Dyson Heydon says of Kathy Jackson that she “was instrumental in revealing the conduct of Michael Williamson and Craig Thomson to the authorities. For this she is owed much praise.”
Kathy continues to live the high life with partner and Abbott appointee Michael Lawler who, after a damning report into his fraudulent claim for nine months sick leave while he worked on Kathy’s case, was allowed to resign rather than be sacked, presumably so he can still claim his $250,000-a-year statutory pension.
It is increasingly apparent that transparent accountable government is a fantasy under the Coalition government who will protect themselves and their mates at all costs and who will do anything to discredit anyone who challenges them.