There is a terrible stench rising in this country and it took solid, fetid form yesterday.
In Canberra, News Corp journalist Annika Smethurst had her home raided and her belongings rifled through.
The raid related to a story written by Smethurst, the political editor of News Corp Sunday newspapers, on a secret plan that would have allowed the Australian Signals Directorate to spy on Australian citizens for the first time and gain access to their emails, bank records and text messages.
The story included primary source material including correspondence between bureaucrats.
Let’s just get that out there again — a secret plan for the ASD to spy on Australian citizens for the first time.
Fourteen months later, the federal wallopers turned up at the journalist’s door with a search warrant signed off by a magistrate.
Much of the babble on Twitter was of the ugly, prejudiced variety with little or no understanding of the profoundly damaging exercise this was.
Smethurst was a News Corp journalist, and she got her right whack or so much of the 280-character nonsense went. Welcome to social media and the new McCarthyism.
If Smethurst’s reporting was not in the public interest — eg: reporting on a secret decision to allow one of our intelligence agencies to spy on the citizenry with no appropriate oversight — then it would be hard to imagine what the public interest is or indeed, what rights the public has left.
Later in the day, Ben Fordham announced on his afternoon radio show on 2GB that six asylum seeker boats were on their way to this country from Sri Lanka.
That information had been obtained from a source which Fordham appropriately refused to identify.
Was this news in the public interest? Obviously yes — and more importantly — attempts to suppress news of boat arrivals have no substantial national interest purpose other than sparing embarrassment for the government of the day.
Fordham was contacted afterwards by the Department of Home Affairs and advised that while he would not be the subject of charges, the department wanted Fordham to dob in his source.
“It was explained to me that only a limited number of people had access to the information we broadcast,” he said.
“The chances of me revealing my sources is zero. Not today, not tomorrow, next week or next month. There is not a hope in hell of that happening.”
The effect of these grim interventions will not diminish journalists’ willingness to report on matters in the public interest. But their sources, the whistle blowers who act out of concern for the overreach of government and law enforcement agencies, will be terrified into compliance or find themselves banged up in stir, their lives ruined. That’s what the state sponsored intimidation is designed to stop.
As I write this, the AFP is banging on the doors of the ABC.
These are not the actions of law enforcement agencies acting in a free and open society but to the extent they are responsible is misleading.
The agencies are acting on behalf of their political masters who make laws that are waved through our parliaments on bipartisan terms.
In case you think this is merely a rant about journalism, think again. Look at what happened at Sydney’s Vivid Festival on Friday night where an impromptu dance festival on a street closed to motorists was shut down by police.
We are going to have rethink the word festival in Australia because police regard peaceful public celebrations as riots waiting to happen.
Wander around Sydney and see the signs prohibiting the consumption of alcohol in public and warning of fines for miscreants.
Call it the new advance of the Rechabites, if you like, but there is something else going on here. I could point to the thousands of children who have been strip searched on the basis of a false positive reactions from police sniffer dogs; or adults terrified by being searched behind a screen at railway stations.
It is not just New South Wales and not just Sydney, the bleak, forbidding locked down city it has become. It is more than the act of the fun police bleakly intervening to stop citizens lawfully having a good time.
What is of greatest concern is our governments, federal, state and local and their agencies view the citizenry in general with suspicion if not outright contempt. We are judged not at our best nor even our mean but by our worst members.
An informed public would seem to be a government’s gravest fear. As far as the law enforcement apparatus is concerned, the public interest is an inconvenience and where it conflicts with their perception of national security issues, it falls a long way back second to the point now where it has virtually ceased to exist.
So, what can we do? Regrettably, not much. We’ve come too far, given away too much.
We’re cooked. We’re done.
This is not something the people can overcome. The ballot box is really our only saving grace but regardless of which side of the dispatch box the major parties sit in the House of Representatives, they will cobble together laws that chip away at our right to privacy, our freedoms of movement, assembly and expression while stepping all over our right to be informed rather than drowned in political rhetoric and assorted national security bullshit.
You might say this is not Australia. Sadly, it is but if you were looking around for a parallel you could say we are living in Singapore with a bit of Russia thrown in for good measure.
This column was first in The Australian on 5 June, 2019