SYDNEY, Australia — One journalist is being investigated for reporting that several boats filled with asylum seekers recently tried to reach Australia from Sri Lanka. Another reporter had her home raided by the authorities this week after reporting on a government plan to expand surveillance powers.
Then on Wednesday, the Australian federal police showed up at the main public broadcaster with a warrant for notes, story pitches, emails, and even the diaries for entire teams of journalists and senior editors — all in connection with a 2017 article about Australian special forces being investigated over possible war crimes in Afghanistan.
The aggressive approach — which Australia’s prime minister, Scott Morrison, has defended — fits with a global trend. Democracies from the United States to the Philippines are increasingly targeting journalists to ferret out leaks, silence critics and punish information sharing — with President Trump leading the verbal charge by calling journalists “the enemy of the people.”
But even among its peers, Australia stands out. No other developed democracy holds as tight to its secrets, experts say, and the raids are just the latest example of how far the country’s conservative government will go to scare officials and reporters into submission.
“To be perfectly frank, this is an absolute international embarrassment,” said Johan Lidberg, an associate professor of journalism at Monash University in Melbourne who works with the United Nations on global press freedom. “You’ve got a mature liberal democracy that pursues and hunts down whistle-blowers and tries to kill the messenger.”
The symptoms of what Mr. Lidberg describes as a national illness go beyond the latest investigations, and the causes are rooted in Australia’s history, law and public complacency.
Australia does not have a constitutional protection for freedom of speech. But its criminal code does have Section 70, which makes it a crime for any public official to share information without “lawful authority or excuse.”
That “secrecy foundation” — the law cited in the warrant against the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the target of Wednesday’s raids — essentially states that no one in government can share information without a supervisor’s permission. It has been on the books since 1914, just after the outbreak of World War I, and is modeled on Britain’s draconian Official Secrets Act of 1911.
Then on Wednesday, the Australian federal police showed up at the main public broadcaster with a warrant for notes, story pitches, emails, and even the diaries for entire teams of journalists and senior editors — all in connection with a 2017 article about Australian special forces being investigated over possible war crimes in Afghanistan.
The aggressive approach — which Australia’s prime minister, Scott Morrison, has defended — fits with a global trend. Democracies from the United States to the Philippines are increasingly targeting journalists to ferret out leaks, silence critics and punish information sharing — with President Trump leading the verbal charge by calling journalists “the enemy of the people.”
But even among its peers, Australia stands out. No other developed democracy holds as tight to its secrets, experts say, and the raids are just the latest example of how far the country’s conservative government will go to scare officials and reporters into submission.
“To be perfectly frank, this is an absolute international embarrassment,” said Johan Lidberg, an associate professor of journalism at Monash University in Melbourne who works with the United Nations on global press freedom. “You’ve got a mature liberal democracy that pursues and hunts down whistle-blowers and tries to kill the messenger.”
The symptoms of what Mr. Lidberg describes as a national illness go beyond the latest investigations, and the causes are rooted in Australia’s history, law and public complacency.
Australia does not have a constitutional protection for freedom of speech. But its criminal code does have Section 70, which makes it a crime for any public official to share information without “lawful authority or excuse.”
That “secrecy foundation” — the law cited in the warrant against the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the target of Wednesday’s raids — essentially states that no one in government can share information without a supervisor’s permission. It has been on the books since 1914, just after the outbreak of World War I, and is modeled on Britain’s draconian Official Secrets Act of 1911.
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