This essay by Seumas Phelan was stolen from the November issue of the quarterly publication by the Sydney PEN. Some of you may have heard the interview on Radio National with Frank Moorhouse today, his article ‘The writer in a time of terror’ is in the November issue [PDF], along with this article, and others. Well worth the read. Check it out.

Information is power, and access to information is the bedrock of democracy, which means rule by the people. Above any other system of government, democracy depends on informed choice - and for this you have to be able to get the information in the first place.

But the people’s right to know is under three major new threats in Australia. The first is from outright control by the Federal Government, under legislation which by an Orwellian twist is called the Freedom of Information law. In fact, this law is used by those in political power to prevent the public in general, and the media in particular, from finding out the most basic information on what their government is doing, including how taxpayers’ money - our money - is being spent, and who made the decisions and why.

This was clearly demonstrated in the recent notorious High Court ruling against The Australian newspaper and in favour of the Government’s power to keep secret basic information on the preparation of the national budget. To achieve this, all a minister (in this case Treasurer Peter Costello) has to do is issue a certificate saying that in his or her view the release of the information is not in the public interest. The Government actually spent about $1.5 million of taxpayers’ money to stop the public finding out how the Treasury justified not giving taxpayers relief from bracket creep and what potential rorts were involved in the first-home buyers’ scheme.

The case cost News Corp $1million in legal fees, and it lost. Few media companies will be willing or able to put up that kind of money again, so effectively the courts have given the executive branch of government the power to keep secret any information - and crucially, any document - it wants, on the whim of one of its own ministers. The most shameful aspect of this ruling is that it was imposed under laws that purport to protect the Australian people’s right to freedom of information. Even the majority of the High Court judges stated: “A practical consequence [of this decision] may be that one or more of the stated objects of the Act are thereby defeated.’’

The second threat to Australians’ ability to get a range of news and views is the potential concentration of ownership and control that is likely to occur under the Howard Government’s proposed new media laws. These would scrap the rules that prevent media companies from owning television networks as well as newspapers, and lift the ban on foreign ownership of Australian media outlets. At present, media magnates in this country can either be “Princes of Print or Queens of the Beware the police state Screen”, as former Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating put it - in other words, they can own newspapers or television networks, but they can’t own both in the same metropolitan area. This was an Australian solution to an Australian problem, and even critics admit it’s worked pretty well. The effect has been to share media power among three main groups - News Corp, the local arm of Rupert Murdoch’s major global operation; Fairfax, which has been lost to the Fairfax family and is now run by corporate investors; and Publishing and Broadcasting Ltd, the Packer family company formerly run by Kerry Packer, Australia’s richest man, and since his death by his son James. This arrangement gave Australian citizens access to three diverse and competing sources of information and opinion, plus the public-service ABC - and between the lot of them, we’ve all had a pretty good idea of what’s going on locally, nationally and internationally. But if media control was concentrated in the hands of one or two megapowerful groups, that range of news and views could be lost or at least diluted, and there is the chance we’d miss out on stories or information that were troubling to those in control – “the inconvenient truth”, as Al Gore would put it.

Common sense will tell you that you won’t find excessive criticism of the Murdochs in News Corp publications. Likewise you wouldn’t get too much dirt on Fairfax in The Sydney Morning Herald or The Age - in fact, when I worked for the SMH, there were specific instructions under a file marked ‘Our News’ that any story about the company or its publications had to be referred to senior management before it appeared (this is on the public record, so I’m not giving away any secrets). Of course, the instruction didn’t say no-one was to be critical of the company, and there are fearless journalists at Fairfax who have been. But it did mean that before your story went in the paper, it had to be vetted by the people who hired you, fired you and decided on your pay and promotion. No pressure.

I’ve always had a certain respect for Kerry Packer in this connection. Most media operations claim to be impartial, objective and above personal considerations - but not the Big Fella. When the Fairfax journalists were campaigning in favour of media diversity in the late 1980s, under the slogan ‘Two Is Too Few’, we drew up a Charter of Editorial Independence that any potential buyer of the newspaper group could sign to establish their bona fides. Most corporate suitors duly signed, but Packer refused point-blank. “If I buy them, they’ll be my bloody newspapers, and they’ll say what I bloody want,” he growled - and he was the honest

one, in my view, because the others would have signed the charter, and then ignored it once they had their hands on the levers of power. However, the worst threat to the people’s right to know is already on the statute books - the socalled sedition laws, under which journalists can be jailed for up to five years simply for telling the truth. Under these laws, it is illegal to report, for example, that someone has been arrested, or to publish that information, or to reveal what anyone has said about it. Frankly, these are the laws of a police state - and they have been enacted in the name of democracy.

Let’s be fair: there is a balance to be struck here. Only the most loony civil libertarian would demand freedom of information to publish bomb-making instructions, for instance, or a recipe for nerve gas or ways to poison the water supply. But these laws target legitimate reporting on issues of public interest, and potentially block criticism or scrutiny of whatever government is in power, without any demonstrated benefit to national security. Sedition means incitement to overthrow the government. Since when was it sedition to report that people have been detained or to investigate possible miscarriages of justice? We do it every day in the media, and I haven’t noticed mobs storming the Burley-Griffin palaces in Canberra. But under these laws (formal title the Anti-Terrorism (No.2) Act 2005, passed through Federal Parliament last December), journalists and publishers and lawyers face severe fines and heavy jail terms for just such reporting. The journalists’ union, the Media Alliance, has demanded amendments to the law that would protect journalists’ ability to work professionally and allow the media to operate in the public interest. “The sedition provisions in this legislation pose a very real threat to the foundations of a free press in this country,” the Alliance says in its call to action. “The compound effect of these laws together with other anti-terror legislation, government policies, court decisions and threats to personal safety will compromise the obligation we as the media have to inform, question and foster democracy through public debate.”

And it’s not just media professionals who are at risk - these laws threaten every citizen, and diminish all our freedoms, and they are spreading around the Western world. Under the Australian law, “seditious intention” now covers any action or statement that could be considered to urge interference with the government of the day or its legislation. Just the sort of thing that’s featured in this article, as a matter of fact. What’s that knock at the door?

This entry was posted by Will on Tuesday, October 31st, 2006 at 9:51 am and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.