I think we're all getting lost, so rank one, rank two. What's your message for the day? Free Julien Assange. Good afternoon everyone, thank you very much for coming. Today we start, of course, by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the land on which we stand today, other terrible and juggera people. We pay our respects to their elders, past and present and also to all emerging leaders. We acknowledge Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the first Australians and recognise their cultures, histories and diversity, their deep connection to the lands, the waters and the seas of beautiful Queensland and the Torres Strait. My name is Mia Armattage, I am bit biased towards Queenslander. I live on the Northern Rivers now of New South Wales, also a very beautiful area. In case you're wondering what brings a Byron Bay Journal here today, it is my connection to Dr John Jiggins, first and foremost, who has taken on a lot of the responsibility, if not all of the responsibility of organising today's event. Could we please just put our hands together to thank him for us. Dr John Jiggins is part of a citizen journalism project. We lead at Bay FM community radio station in Byron Bay where I work. That project is called the Community Newsroom and any journalists are welcome to join us. So please just get in touch with Bay FM down in Byron Bay. If you are interested or know anyone else who is, all levels of experience are welcome, whether you would like to be a mentor or whether you are an emerging journalist or a student. I also work there in Byron Bay for an independent newspaper. Some of you may have heard of it, it's called the Byron Shire Echo. I think it's featured on media, watch it once or twice. And it also has an online daily news echo net daily. One of the other connections between the Northern Rivers and today's event is in fact Julian Assange himself, the star of the show, although he cannot be here. Julian Assange spent part of his childhood on the Northern Rivers and photographs of him as a young boy in his public school class, you know for the class photo, they have been published in the local newspapers on the Northern Rivers quite a few times now. He went to a very small school, we have several of them dotted around the hinterland. And so he's considered one of our own, if you like. Most people in the Northern Rivers are passionate supporters of the campaign to free Julian Assange. And then the other connection is just my own role as a journalist. When I was studying journalism here in Brisbane at the Queensland University of Technology, I was following his story. It was pretty disappointing to me that when I discovered that there were some journalists out there who went so far as to deny his title as a journalist. Thankfully, I think we've turned a major corner in that sort of journalism. Our first session for today is called Truth. This is a lonely warrior. We're going to examine the major threat to our democracy by the attack on free speech and whistleblowers by powerful actors in politics, the security establishment and sadly the media. Our speakers for this morning are Professor Ajay Brown. They are all on stage. Professor Ajay Brown is sitting there in the centre. Greg Barnes, who is not physically present. Terry O'Gorman is on stage. He is over here to my far right. And David McBride, sitting right here. And you may recognise his name. That was very well known whistleblower. Greg Barnes sends his apologies. He can't be here today owing to some case commitments on Monday in Hobart, another beautiful city. They prevent him from coming today, and he has centre recording of his presentation. So our first speaker is to be Professor Ajay Brown. He's a professor of public policy and law in the School of Government and International Relations at Griffith University. He's also a leader of the Centre for Governance and Public Policy's Integrity, Leadership and Public Trust Program. A 25-year veteran of developments in Australia's integrity system since 2010, Professor Ajay Brown has been a board member of Transparency International Australia, the World Anti-Corruption Organization, and in 2017 and again in 2020, he was elected to Transparency International's Global Board, where he's led the development of its current worldwide strategy called Holding Power to Account 2021-2030. His most recent work written with Kieran Pender, Protecting Australia's Whistleblowers, the federal roadmap was published in November 2022 by Griffith University Human Rights Law Centre. We'll welcome him to the stage shortly, but before we do, I would like to let everybody know that there's been a raffle being held today, and all the proceeds, of course, are going towards the campaign to free Julian Assangeman Belmarsh prison and bring him home. Tickets can be purchased at the front here. The two dollars each, or you can get six... For five dollars. For five dollars, thank you. The first prize is fabulous. It's this book, which you may have seen out in front, The Child Julian Assange by Nils Meltzer. He's the UN Special Rapporteur on torture. He has been to Australia. He's spoken to the Australian media before about what he calls torture. It's officially described as torture of Julian Assange and demanding his freedom. So that's the first prize. And the second prize, also a very fashionable second prize, is a t-shirt, a free Julian Assange t-shirt. If you don't win the raffle and you can afford to buy either the book or the t-shirt, in particular the t-shirt, get one. Please welcome to the stage Professor AJ Brown. Thank you very much, Mayor. And a big thank you to John for the invitation to be part of today's very, very important event. Congratulations to you for coming out on a Sunday for such an important event in such numbers and make sure you buy all of those raffle tickets. That's all I can say. It's a great pleasure to be here, especially to be here with John Shipton for this afternoon's proceedings because I think your participation shows that you understand but I think it's very, very important for as much as possible of the wider community to really understand just how important historically this moment is, how important historically the treatment of Julian Assange and the nature of the WikiLeaks story is and just how important a moment we're at for trying to bring about both the actions and the reforms that will mean that the kind of mistreatment of truth-tellers in our society that we're seeing, continuing to see at the moment, can be stopped and prevented in the way that the broader community, the wider public, certainly understand and appreciate should be the case. I was really reminded of the fact that this is the long-term significance of the Julian Assange campaign and the outcome of what happens in relation to Julian is so significant because it really is going to define what happens for decades, the same way that what happened with Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers in the 1970s defined for decades the way that we understand power, truth, the role of the media and the role of whistleblowing. And it's now such a protracted, drawn-out case Julian's treatment that it really has become multi-generational. I met Julian once in June 2011 when he was under house arrest at Ellingham Hall in Norfolk and I can't believe that that was 12 years ago because he's effectively been incarcerated in one form or another ever since that time. That's almost half a generation. My own son, Amon, who's here today studying legal studies in the NSW school system, the front cover of his legal studies textbook is a picture of Julian being extracted from the Ecuadorian Embassy. On Friday, his class was talking about Julian and the wider implications of all of this case. So this is now a multi-generational case in effect and its significance can't be overstated. There'll be plenty of discussion, I think, in the course of the afternoon about WikiLeaks, about Julian, about the significance of these cases, about press freedom and about secrecy and about the role of the media and journalism. And so we'll be coming back to all of that. But this first session and it's a privilege to kick it off is actually about, not about journalists, not about publishers and editors like Julian. It's actually about the whistleblowers who are the origin of the information that WikiLeaks was always intended to maximise and to bring forward. And obviously we're talking about not just simply the response in terms of the persecution of journalists and editors and publishers like Julian, but we're also faced with the fact that very often, even when we have decision makers and powerful people and powerful interests who realise that it's a dangerous thing to persecute journalists and the media, often they don't realise that, but very often they do realise that it's a dangerous thing politically to persecute publishers and journalists and the media, they will still persecute the whistleblower. And the nature of whistleblower protection is an issue and the importance of it is an issue in and of its own right, although it's so much woven up with the WikiLeaks story because WikiLeaks was the first revolutionary global platform for giving whistleblowers an outlet such as never existed before. And so in this session, we really wanted to focus on whistleblower protection in particular. And so I wanted to do that with reference less to Julian but more to some of the existing prosecutions that we have underway in Australia today, including the one that's been brought against my esteemed fellow panel member, David McBride, but also the Australian tax office whistleblower, Richard Boyle, who many of you will have heard of or met or been following as well. And other cases in the background, witness Kay from the Intelligence Services and his lawyer Bernard Kaleri, and I'm sure there'll be some reference to those cases as well. I really wanted to say three things. One is that our whistleblower protection laws in Australia, federally and at a state level typically, but let's focus federally for the moment, are broken or indeed we're never good enough to start with rather than having been good and then broken. But the positive message on this is that we know what to do about it. We know how they should be fixed and remitted and there are processes underway that may or may not, and we can talk about that actually lead to the right types of fixes. The second thing I wanted to mention very briefly in a moment is the way in which we do have evidence of the way in which some of our laws are working, which we can learn from the prosecutions including David, some very perverse outcomes which actually confirms some of the things that are working about our law while reinforcing the fact that on the whole our laws aren't working enough and that their reform is such a priority. And then finally and thirdly, just some thoughts on what we need to do about it. In terms of the first thing I wanted to say, the fact that we know our whistleblower laws are broken or weren't good enough to begin with, but we do know what to do about it, I wanted to let you know a little bit about the report that Mia mentioned in the introduction which is a live tracking, if you like, of the problems with our federal whistleblowing legislative protection landscape and what needs to be done about it. And it's this report that's on the screen there for you now, the one that she introduced. I won't go through it blow by blow. It does certainly refer to David and it certainly refers to Richard Boyle and to other cases along the way. But I want you to know that it's there and please do use it as a reference as many people are when you're thinking and talking to other people about what it is that needs to be fixed in our whistleblower protection laws. It's easy to say we've got to protect whistleblowers, we shouldn't be persecuting them, but exactly what needs to happen is something that we know, we know what needs to happen. And our report maps out very concrete steps not just for the public sector whistleblowers but for private sector whistleblowers and all those caught in the crossover between the public sector and the private sector. There's a very clear roadmap that we've laid out for really what needs to be happening. And I won't go through all of the key points. They'll make sense to you for yourselves when you have a read. But just to emphasise, I guess, that there are sort of three big questions about our laws. One is, which is really the green bubbles in the middle of this presentation, are that many of the legal rules and principles that we've been relying on to provide whistleblowers with protection when they do speak up about public interest wrongdoing within their agency or publicly. We know where they don't work and why they don't work, and we know how to fix them even to catch up with world's current best practice in other jurisdictions in Europe. There's been a tidal wave of legislative reform in the right direction happening around the world at the same time as we know that whistleblowers are certainly under pressure right around the world. So there are basic legal things about the content of our rules and I'll come back to an example of that in a minute. There's questions about when our rules apply and their technical types of rules, and I'll come back to that as well in relation to David's case. And then there's really basic questions about the enforcement machinery of our laws. So we have a long track record of having tried to find ways to make sure that when we create legal protections for whistleblowers that actually they will be enforced. Up until now, we now know that, and we know this again from the prosecutions that are happening at a federal level, that those enforcement mechanisms aren't strong enough and that we need new ones. And so hence something that many people including, I'll just acknowledge, Greg McMahon from the Queensland whistleblowers action group who's here today has said for a long time that we need a whistleblower protection authority, a dedicated institution to actually ensure these laws are enforced. And over the years he's been proven right. We've tried everything else and we've shown that they don't work at a state and federal level. We clearly need that. Well, why? Well, let's dive into a couple of these cases for understanding exactly why. What I wanted to do in saying that in perverse ways we can see that some of the strengths of our whistleblower protection laws in Australia, I'll just refer to Richard Boyle's case a little bit and then also to David's case a little bit because one of the really interesting things about a good whistleblower protection law is that it should protect people if they blow the whistle internally within their agency and our laws on paper theoretically try to do that although they need strengthening. It should provide protections to people who blow the whistle about public interest wrongdoing if they go to a regulatory body, to the police, to the Crime and Corruption Commission, whatever and largely our laws try and do that although not well enough and they need improvement and then they should also protect people if they go public, if they go to WikiLeaks, if they go to the media, if they self-publish in the internet. If they do that because of the fact that either they have no avenue to blow the whistle internally or to a regulator or it wasn't safe to do so or they've tried that and it hasn't worked and that's 99% of the case what happens. And what's really interesting about the prosecutions of some of our federal whistleblowers currently is that they actually show that some parts of those rules are actually working quite well. The primary test for going public if you're a federal government whistleblower, someone like David, is the primary test is whether you believe on reasonable grounds that your prior public interest disclosure inside the system or to a regulator, to someone like the Inspector General of the ADF, that that was not dealt with appropriately, that it was not resolved appropriately. If you've got reasonable grounds to believe that then you're entitled with a few other tricks and trips, you're entitled to receive protection if you go public as someone like David did. What's really interesting is that we now know from some of these prosecutions that there is good evidence that that particular test is helping protect quite a lot of whistleblowers who if they do go public and their agency wants to prosecute them for going public, that the Australian Federal Police and the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions actually say to the agency, well, no, actually I suggest you don't do that because the test is a reasonable one in and of itself and that they'll be entitled to protection under the law. So we're not going to take that prosecution. We're not going to investigate that offence. How do we know that? Because we know that because they've said that and the Australian Federal Police has actually said that. But we also know it from the prosecutions that are happening because many of you will be aware that Richard Boyle, the Australian Taxation Office official who's been prosecuted as a result of his disclosures about oppressive tax collection practices against small business over some years by the Australian Taxation Office, recently lost his hearing to receive the protection of the whistleblower protection laws against the prosecution that he's still subject to in Adelaide. But what's he been prosecuted with? We know that in fact he's being charged and prosecuted and pursued because he ended up going public and going to four corners and blowing the story open and then subsequently he's been vindicated. But what's he actually been charged with? He's actually been charged not with going public because the fact is that he's got a reasonable belief that his original disclosures inside the system were not dealt with appropriately. In fact, it's more than a reasonable belief. It's a fact that's been pretty well established. So they haven't charged him with going public. What they've done is they've charged him with technical offences to do with recording information under the Tax Act that he shouldn't have recorded, with secretly recording conversations he was having with colleagues that were part of the disciplinary action or other actions that were being taken against him within the ATO. Very small technical offences have been chosen to prosecute him that actually have nothing to do with him going public. So the failure of his hearing was actually to say, well, and this is a defect in the law. It's number five. If you want to look at our report, that the preparatory acts to making the disclosure, which is where those alleged offences were committed, that they're not covered by the Act, that you can get protection for blowing the whistle, for actually making the disclosure, or for going public potentially, but you can't get protection for any criminal offences you might have committed as part of. What I would certainly assess and argue, the judge disagreed, but I would assess and argue as being reasonable actions taken in preparation for or as part of or as a prelude to taking that disclosure. That's what he's been charged with. The South Australian District Court has said, agreeing with the submissions of the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions that we should take a very, very narrow view of those protections and that they shouldn't apply to those preparatory acts. That will now be appealed by Richard Boyle, which is a very good thing. That's another campaign you can contribute to. And I'm hopeful that other voices, like the Human Rights Law Centre, are certainly looking at joining that appeal because of the importance of that principle. Irrespective of that, we need to fix the law, but in order to make it clear that those reasonable preparatory acts are covered and included. So that's quite doable. That needs to be done. But it would be good if the appeal outcome was better as well. But the underlying message of all of this is how clearly it demonstrates that in this case, this particular agency, the Australian Taxation Office, supported by the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions, has basically pursuing these particular offences effectively as a surrogate for the real crime, which the law is actually sort of successfully protecting Richard Boyle from, which is having gone public. So there's a perverse outcome here, which actually points to the fact that there are parts of these laws that are working and other parts that aren't. Sort of a confirmation of the same issue really comes from David's case in some ways because I was very glad to be asked to be an expert witness in David's... part of David's defence. And my evidence, if it had been allowed, and we can hear more from others about why it wasn't allowed for national security reasons apparently, was simply that in somebody in David's position, if he made a disclosure of wrongdoing to an appropriate authority in the system, like the Inspector General of the Australian Defence Force, and that wasn't dealt with appropriately, then he was entitled to protection for going public under the law. But the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions decided, using national security arguments, to basically decide that that type of evidence was not going to be admissible in the case. And so therefore, we don't get the opportunity to actually demonstrate that in fact someone in David's position had actually blown the whistle internally first and therefore should be entitled to those protections if in fact he went further. So those are just some examples of why we know that our laws aren't working but also the fact that we know what needs to be fixed about them and the fact that we do have some bits of the law that are working. What do we need to do about it? We need a stronger new political consensus around the importance of the issue. It's really important that we do have a new federal government that has committed to start doing some of these reforms and when you look at our report, you'll see there's a little bit of a checklist of how far they've got so far, and we'll be updating that. And it's not that far compared to what actually needs to be done. But we have an opportunity, but it needs to be an opportunity that's a genuine political consensus. We need to recognise that there are good people in all political parties who are actually very strongly supportive of getting this right. Our own Senator Paul Scar from the Liberal National Party in Queensland, for example, is a very strong supporter. No political party actually has a monopoly on getting this right. And so I really strongly urge you to be mindful about both the moment that we're in in terms of the importance of these issues and the fact that we do know what needs to be done and that all political parties, all political voices, can be and should be part of that solution. So thank you very much. Thank you very much for that. That's really fascinating that we've got that document to refer to now, too. Our next speaker cannot be here today, as I said at the start, and that is Greg Barnes. He's got some case commitments down in Hobart tomorrow. So we have to applaud very loudly for him, according to our organizer, Dr John Jiggins, because he's sent us a recording of his speech. So let's welcome Greg Barnes. Nice and loud. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Greg Barnes. I'm an advisor to the Australian Assange campaign. I'm sorry I can't be with you this afternoon, but getting up from Hobart and back in a day, which I now had to do, it's just too difficult. Firstly, can I acknowledge the win and the people on whose land I meet today in Tasmania, and I acknowledge Elders past and present. What I want to talk to you about today is something I think is going to be touched on by Theria Gorman, but I want to talk more broadly about it. And that is the way in which truth is getting harder to find or even to expose in the Australian political setting, certainly since 9-11, where we've seen the principle of open justice, protection for whistleblowers become even more perilous than it otherwise was in Australia, particularly in view of the fact that Australia, unlike most other jurisdictions, does not have a human rights act. So I'm just going to share a number of slides with you which deal with these questions. Unfortunately, technology won't allow me to join in the Q&A afterwards, but if you have any questions, feel free to send them through and the email me, John Jiggins has got my email, and I'm very happy to answer it. So let me now just share my screen with you. What we're going to be looking at is what I'm calling legislative threats to outing truth, and we'll work through each of these to demonstrate the point. The first point is that it might amaze you, but since 9-11, the Australian Parliament has passed around 100 pieces of legislation, often under the guise of anti-terrorism laws, but as is often the case, when you use particular techniques and principles in one context, that is in the context of the so-called war on terror, you then find those same concepts being translated more broadly, and we've certainly seen that in some of the cases like that Terry's touching on, such as Bernard Caleri, witness Jay, David McBride is with you today, a number of others who are finding themselves entrapped in a legal framework and culture, which is emanated really from legislation passed in the wake of 9-11. The Assange case, of course, can be seen in the same category. It's a case which exposed, as we know, war crimes on the part of the United States and its allies, which exposed the war on terror and what is happening in the context of the war on terror. If Assange were in Australia, he would find himself entrapped in these laws, some of these laws that I'm going to talk to you about shortly. And of course, we've seen in the context of the threat to the truth, these notorious raids on journalists a number of years ago now, you'll remember the raids on the ABC, the raids on News Ltd, particularly a couple of journalists. I think one of the journalists complaining, for example, that the AFP was sort of rifling through her personal clothing drawers as they were in her home in Canberra, the ABC had to spend almost a day with its lawyers combing through material with the AFP to work out what information was privileged and what's not. Extraordinary that we are seeing this happening in Australia and extraordinary that it might happen again. In other words, it wasn't a one-off. The National Security and Information Legislation, as I say, I think Terry Gorman's going to raise that legislation in the context of Calari and Witton's Jay, because, of course, this legislation, which again was passed in the context of the war on terror, and I've had experience with this legislation in the so-called Melbourne terrorism trial that I was involved in for one of the accused back in 2006 to 2008. This is legislation that was notoriously used in Calari and Witton's Jay in the context of seeking to shut out any scrutiny of the courts. The Attorney General's Department rather blandly says that, and I've got the quote there for you, that it provides a framework of how national security information is disclosed and protected in criminal and civil proceedings. It balances the need to protect national security information with the principle of open justice, and as I say, many would disagree. Certainly my experience has been that the balance is well and truly tipped in favour of protecting national security information. Of course, it begs the question, what is national security information? And there's a temptation always on the part of security agencies such as ASIO, the AFP, and others to put a label on material to say that's national security, therefore we have to use this particular legislation. It's a threat to democracy.  We're protecting the rule of law, and that's why we have this legislation. But as I said, it tips the balance towards serving the interests of the security state. So let me give you an illustration of how it works. In the case I was involved in back in 2006, there was an application to effectively stop a particular witness's statement from being given to the defence. That was potentially quite important with us. And the Commonwealth turned up with its own lawyers in addition to the barrister's brief of the DPP and said to then the magistrate, because it was in committal proceedings, look, this is National Security Act information and proceedings. Therefore we don't have to show the defence what this material is so they can make their own assessment of whether or not it is in the interest of national security to keep it secret. But what we're going to do is we're going to give you an affidavit of all the material. So they give it to the magistrate to go and read at his or her leisure. The magistrate then comes back on the bench, I might say looking rather white-faced, ashen-faced saying, wow, yes, this is definitely national security information. No sorry to the defence, you can't have it and no, this person doesn't have to give evidence. Now, if this sort of stuff happens in other parts of the world that don't subscribe theoretically to the rule of law, we shrug our shoulders and say, yep, that's what happens. This is happening in Australia. This is happening regularly and some of you there today may have come across this sort of ruse, this sort of practice. It's a dangerous practice because as I say, if you're acting as counsel or as legal advisers to a person who's charged with offences which might be said to touch upon national security, you have no way of knowing whether or not you're having a wall pulled over your eyes, whether or not your client is being treated unfairly. So it's legislation which is anathema to the way in which we should conduct court proceedings in Australia. The other aspect of it that I haven't mentioned here but which I will mention is the fact that there are provisions in the act that say if you want to ask a particular type of question to a witness and we deem that it's a national security issue, that question has to go to the Attorney General and the Attorney General has to say yes or no as to whether or not you can ask that question. So you can have in proceedings, although smart courts and smart judges get around it because it's unworkable. You can ask a question of the witness in the witness box. The question has to be sent to Canberra. When you get the reply, you can ask the question. You can imagine doing that if you had say 10 or 15 questions you wanted to ask a witness every time you asked it, we had to go through this procedure. It would take you months to get through in that process. But the fact that our politicians and policymakers could dream up such scenarios and such unworkable legislation tells you something about the way in which they're prepared to undermine the rule of law and open courts and, of course, democracy. The inherent unfairness I've already talked about, the fact that you're not getting a fair trial. Now, we all know what Article 14 of the International Covenant Civil and Political Rights says you're entitled to a fair and public hearing in relation to any matters, but particularly in relation to criminal charges. There is real what we call inequality of arms in these cases. We've seen this in the Assange case, demonstrable examples of inequality in the way in which the defence, Julian's London legal team is treated and the way in which the United States lawyers are able to conduct proceedings. We have stacked the odds against a fair hearing so sharply since 9-11 and it's continuing to happen. And we see it in cases that are currently before the courts and we saw it, of course, as Terry Will has told you in relation to 9-11. And this legislation sits on the statute books year after year. As I say, it's been there since 2004. It can be used at any time by the Commonwealth and is used by the Commonwealth. And there just seems to be no debate amongst legislators about saying, let's take stock of this legislation that now almost 20 years old to see whether we really need it. Do we need it? How offensive is it in terms of undermining fundamental principles of democracy? As I already said, the certificates have to be issued by the Attorney General. Again, political decisions. The Attorney General can say, right, this is information. If it's disclosed, it will prejudice national security. If the witness discloses information, it will prejudice national security. And I'm going to issue a certificate saying that you can't ask those questions or that person cannot disclose that information. I've already touched on how it works. But think about it from this perspective. Firstly, the decision of the Attorney General is political. It's not legal. It's a political decision. Secondly, what does it mean to prejudice national security? We all know how the term national security can be abused. The term prejudice national security is also a term that can be abused. In the Assange case, of course, the enemies of Assange and what he did say, this prejudice is national security. You have to stamp out this sort of behaviour. We know, of course, that he was doing us a great service by exposing what our governments get up to in theatres of war. But if you were to believe and listen to those in the military, those in the Attorney General's department, the Attorney General's themselves, they will take a very different view. It's a political view. It's really saying we don't want you to know. And that's why we're going to say it prejudices national security. Again, for that reason, very dangerous legislation. It's been condemned. I've just got a quote here from Mark Ricks who's done some writing around this area. I won't go through the whole quote, but the eminent jurist panel of the ICJ, the International Commission Jurists, which is an eminent body, has noted just how this legislation is so unfair that the needs of the accused, who, by the way, might end up going to jail for 20 years or more for some of these offences, particularly under anti-terrorism legislation, is not able to really challenge the evidence that's being used against them. Let's have a look at another piece of legislation that does similar things. And this one is particularly egregious. In 2014, the then Abbott government, which might have been just the start of the Turnbull government, passed a piece of legislation called the National Security Legislation Amendment Act. Essentially, it said this. The Director-General of ASIO, and I think also ASIS, can deem a particular operation being carried out as what is called special intelligence operation.  The only things that will mean that they would get charged would be if they murdered someone or there was a manslaughter. They caused someone serious injuries, such as, for example, broken jaw, broken eye socket. Even those might not be considered to be serious injury, depending on the criminal law.  But it does mean, for example, that they can falsely imprison you. It does mean they can commit assaults on you so long as it's not serious injury.  They could isolate you in a room for a period of time. They can download material from your phone without a warrant. They can do all sorts of things, and they're immune from prosecution or from the person taking any civil action. Now, that's bad enough. And of course, it meant that the secret bugging of the East Timor cabinet room, which Bernard Kaleri exposed, would have been covered by this law. In other words, there would have been immunity from prosecution. Mind you, as I understand it, there's no one's ever been prosecuted over it. But this would actually say to them, if tick, you can do it because it's a special operation. Worse than that is that reporting on the operations is a criminal offense. So, you know, I have someone I know, this is a fictitious example, who has been raided by AGO. This is based on, let me base this on a case that was before the New South Wales Supreme Court, a number of years ago. AGO took this person from a train, took them into a park, made threats, went to their house, essentially intimidated family members, raided, or not raided, but yeah, they did raid, the rooms in the house, you know, that didn't belong to this particular person. I think it was a sharehouse. All of that could never be reported under these laws. So, you could have, you know, AGO acting really egregiously against a person, and you can't report it. Again, for what purpose? Well, let's have a look at the legislation's name, national security. Again, tipping the balance well and truly in favour of security agencies, which already, of course, are exempt from a lot of the transparency provisions that should apply to those sorts of agencies. Given the work that they do. And then the next example is the foreign interference laws and freedom of speech. Now, the foreign interference laws are current because Bernard Caleri himself is acting for a person who's been charged under those laws. These were laws introduced in 2018 at the height of, mind you, we are now at a new height, but at the height of, at the time, this view that China was spying on Australia, that there were, you know, all these people who were running around, you know, recruiting Australian agents. You might remember notoriously the false allegations made against Shaquette Moslemaine, who was a upper house Labor MP, you know, who got raided, who was on the front page, I think of the Australian accused of being a Chinese spy, completely false. Under this legislation, it creates an offence of what's called reckless foreign interference, and that's the charge that I think has been used in Bernard's case, and I'll comment on that case for the courts. But what does it mean? It means that if a person is seeking to influence an Australian political or government process or right or prejudice Australia's national security, they're committing an offence if they are a foreign person. Now, that is so broad that it would mean, for example, let's say I'm from China and I'm the head of corporate affairs for a Chinese business and I come to Australia and I have a series of meetings with people to try and find out what's going on in Australia in terms of regulations, the market, et cetera, the sort of thing that corporate affairs people do every day. Or I come to Australia and to do some lobbing on behalf of the company. Is that influencing Australian government or governmental political processes or rights? Is it prejudicing Australia's national security? Sarah Kendall from University of Queensland made a very good point in a paper she published, I think, late last year or early this year. You could have a journalist who publishes a story, let's say in, you know, a European newspaper for a journalist or in, for example, a South China Morning Post, Japan Times, et cetera. They can be accused of recklessly harming national security if they publish a story that reveals war crimes committed by members of the Australian Defence Forces. Julian Assange and those who republished that material who are outside of Australia could be charged under these laws.  It also catches journalists who go into covert operations. Often, as we know, journalists will go undercover in order to expose wrongdoing. They and their sources could find themselves equally trapped by this legislation because it could be said that they were influencing an Australian political or governmental process or right or prejudicing security. Again, have a look at the terms and how broad they are. They capture so much that is otherwise essential information, sorry, essential practices in Australia, which is journalists finding out and exposing the truth, publishers finding out and exposing the truth, whistleblowers finding out and exposing the truth. It dampens that considerably through these laws. Let me give you the last slide, which is the fact that we don't have a Human Rights Act in Australia. Of course, you have one in Queensland, you have one in the ACT and one in Victoria, but we don't have an enforceable national human rights charter. So these types of pieces of legislation are able to pass muster and effectively be unchallenged because we don't have any constitutionally enforced rights, enforceable rights. So, for example, in Canada, some aspects of these anti-terror laws have been struck down by the Canadian Supreme Court because they're said to offend charter rights, such as rights to freedom of speech, freedom of movement, etc. Human Rights Act and a human rights charter is not a panacea and it's not a cure-all. But what it would mean is that Australians would be better protected or at least be able to challenge the types of legislation which we're seeing emerge in the 9-11 context. The 9-11 context, of course, is now in some ways been replaced by the scare over China. And let me make this prediction. Orcus, the continued ramping up of hostile rhetoric about China, the sort of fears over Russia and spyware, etc. This will mean, inevitably, we get more legislation and we get even tighter legislation through amendments to the National Security Information Act. We also will see continued prosecutions of individuals, whilst Mark Dreyfus rightly, as Attorney General, ensure that the Kaleri case ended. No guarantees that he'll do that again and in fact, on current indications, it seems that that was a one-off. And there's a culture within security agencies and within the AFP and state police forces for that matter which essentially says, let's use this legislation in order to shut down dissent. We saw it actually in a very relatively minor way here in Tasmania recently over the Easter weekend. There'd been a cybersecurity scare in Tasmanian government. People's data had been compromised and some data had gone on to the dark net. The police commissioner and the head of the Department of Premier and Cabinet wrote a letter to the opposition parties and to all the media saying, we want you to stop reporting on this matter and doing press conferences on this matter and embarrassing the government because every time you do it, it encourages those who've stolen the data. It was an extraordinary intervention by the police commissioner and by the government. There was no legislative basis for it. Fortunately, the Labor Party stuck to its guns on it. I did some media on it after the Australian Lawyers Alliance and the threat went away. But it did scare people and it had a chilling effect. Certainly the Greens from memory said, we're not going to do any more until we get a briefing. Journalists, the ABC, for example, and newspapers in Tasmania had to get legal advice on it. It was outrageous, completely outrageous, particularly outrageous in the context of the fact that cyber security breach story had been running for a couple of weeks prior to that. But this just shows you the sort of mindset that we're dealing with here and the grab for power and the reach for power and the overreach that you're getting on the part of security agencies and on the part of police forces because they can, because we live in an environment where they can. So that is essentially my presentation and what I wanted to say to you today. Let me just stop sharing. As I say, sorry I can't take questions, the technology won't allow, but very happy if you want to come back to me via email or phone to ask any questions or verify any points. And good luck this afternoon and thank you for listening. Thank you very much to Greg Barnes who hopefully is joining us via cyberspace. I think it's live streaming. I wanted to mention I made the assumption that journalists should never reckon assumption that everybody would know who Greg Barnes was because if you've been following Julian Assange's story for many years, he's been in the picture. And the first slide had his title there. He's an advisor to the campaign for Julian Assange's freedom. But just a couple of other things that Greg Barnes has been up to lately. He is actually the spokesperson for the prison action reform and reform group incorporated as well as the Australian Lawyers Alliance. He's got a book out too. So he's an author and the book is called What's Wrong with the Liberal Party? Selling the Australian Government. So yeah, what's wrong with the Liberal Party? Question, selling the Australian Government. I don't know if that's a rhetorical question. He's the co-author of an Australian Republic. So I think he's a passionate Republican. He mentioned there the Bill of Human Rights and I just wanted to let people know that I know you've got one in Queensland. Congratulations. It's not 100% though, is it? There's actually a campaign where I'm living right now in the Northern Rivers, a community grassroots-led campaign to have a Bill of Rights. So if it's something that you're interested in and you'd like a stronger Bill of Rights, there's nothing to stop you from, you know, as starting a campaign and I'm sure Greg Barnes could give you all the advice that you would need. Let's welcome our next speaker to the stage in just a minute. His name is Terry O'Gorman, very well known here in Brisbane. He's done some tireless work over the years to protect civil liberties of Queenslanders and Australians more generally over the past four decades. He's the Vice President of the Queensland Council for Civil Liberties. The President of the Australian Council for Civil Liberties believes that in addition to a commitment to the profession, lawyers have an obligation to ensure civil liberties for all Australians are protected. So he'll be speaking today to high-profile prosecutions in the national security arena. Those are the cases of Bernard Collery and David McBride. Please welcome Terry O'Gorman. Thank you. I won't be speaking in any detail about David McBride because I think he's best positioned to talk about his own case. In an article in the Law Society Journal in July 2022, Kieran Pender, a senior lawyer with the Human Rights Law Centre, observed three men are presently before Australian courts charged with revealing information about the inner workings of government agencies or the conduct of our armed forces. Such prosecution, says Pender, say plenty about the lack of protections afforded to whistleblowers and what is the price for our democracy and why a change of government that occurred last year must signal a new approach for Australia's treatment of whistleblowers. Pender referred to the case of Bernard Collery, who is a distinguished Canberra lawyer and former ACT Attorney-General. Together with his client, witness Kay, Collery was charged in 2018 with secrecy offences. The backdrop to the case is Australia's espionage against Timor-Leste in the early 2000s when Australian intelligence officers are alleged. I don't know why we have to use the word alleged. When Australian intelligence officers bugged the Timor Cabinet Office to gain enough a hand in energy negotiations with the newly independent nation. Witness Kay pleaded guilty and was given a suspended sentence. Collery was charged with a greater number of offences, mostly relating to disclosures to ABC journalists and his case was only recently discontinued by Federal Attorney-General Mark Trayfus KC. Pender in the same Law Society article also referred to the cases of David McBride and Richard Boyle. During Mr. McBride's time as an Australian defence lawyer, he twice served in Afghanistan. He raised concerns internally about Australian soldiers' conduct in Afghanistan before ultimately playing the whistle to the ABC. The so-called ABC Afghan vows reporting revealed multiple incidents of troops killing unarmed men and children and Mr. McBride's allegations were later vindicated by the war crimes allegations made in the Brereton report. Mr. McBride, to the extent he can talk about his own case while it is before the court, will hopefully give you a more in-depth analysis of what is happening to him. Then there is the case of Richard Boyle, who blew the whistle about misconduct within the Australian Taxation Office internally at first and then ultimately to the ABC. Boyle alleged that the ATO was misusing its enforcement powers through unethical debt recovery practices. He has also been vindicated. Several inquiries, including one by the Senate, have confirmed his allegations. But Boyle has been charged in 2019 initially with an astonishing 66 counts later downgraded to 24. That still seems pretty high. Pender notes that it is worth reiterating that Collery, McBride and Boyle are on trial for telling the truth about government wrongdoing. They are on trial for telling the truth about government wrongdoing. No one really denies what they blew the whistle on. Namely, Australia's immoral espionage against Timor-Lest. Who in this country who has followed Timor-Lest's debate would have the slightest doubt that it occurred. The potential war crimes committed by the Special Forces in Afghanistan and misconduct at the Tax Office. All three whistleblowers have been vindicated in one way or another. There is a revised treaty following international legal proceedings in relation to Timor. The Marathon report appears to vindicate Mr McBride and there is now an ongoing, high-level criminal investigation into allegations of war crimes by Australian SAS personnel. There has been a Senate inquiry in relation to Boyle, yet all three have faced imprisonment for telling the truth. For those of you who have read the book of Brian Toohey called Secret State, Brian Toohey is a journalist who has covered national security matters since the early to mid-70s. I'm old enough to have lived through that era and we are now seeing in the 2000s plus or the 2020 plus a replay of what occurred in particularly the early 70s and the early 80s. Namely, under then conservative governments, a willingness to prosecute people for bringing out into the public government wrongdoing and using the mantle of national security to do so. You talk about the wheel turning during the street march era in this state I had a brother, I have a brother but he was then the president of the police union and he was talking to a demonstrator who by that time achieved some reasonably high ranking in the public service. My brother had said to him how the wheel turns and this person said, that's what wheels are there for. A little over a week ago the ACT Supreme Court released sentencing remarks in the case of witness Jay who those remarks have been kept secret for more than three years. In the case of witness Jay, the Independent National Security Legislation Monitor, the current one being Grant Nicholson SC, in June 22 released his report into the operation of the National Security Information Act as it applied in the witness Jay matter. Donaldson notes that as to the publication of the sentencing remarks in witness Jay, it is impossible to conceive that any judge would have openly published the whole and I stress the whole of the sentencing remarks observing it was plainly correct that disclosure of the confidential information that underlay the charges against witness Jay could endanger the lives or safety of others. But Donaldson in a recent report went on to be critical about how much further then was necessary the secrecy in witness Jay in fact went and he has proposed a number of legislative reforms to prevent another witness Jay. It is extraordinary that it has taken three years for the sentencing remarks of witness Jay in the ACT Supreme Court to be published. They've been published in a redacted form with the agreement although one wonders how ready the agreement was from witness Jay lawyers but with the agreement of his lawyers and the prosecution but the fact that it has taken three years for that to come out and remember how it came about. There were a couple of journalists walking around the Canberra Court building and they came upon this case that said no entry, no admission, they made inquiries and they were blocked. What in fact happened was witness Jay was sentenced to a term of imprisonment and whilst in jail there was an attempt to stop him from writing his memoir so he then brought a civil action in the ACT court and it was that civil action that he brought that brought to public attention the fact of the criminal charge in a closed court where the public had been denied any knowledge of it for a whole period of three years. Former New South Wales Justice Anthony Whirly KC has stated that witnesses Jay trial, this is not an aging civil libertarian saying this, this is an ex-Supreme Court judge, he said that witnesses Jay's trial appeared to be quote, a complete abandonment of open justice and justice Whirly queried whether Australia is now a totalitarian state where people are prosecuted, convicted and shunted off to prison without they or the public having any notion as to what happened. Well, witness Jay knew what happened but none of the public of Australia knew and it took three years for the public to find out. Despite these observations, the Independent National Security Legislation Monitor has made three recommendations in his June 2022 report to the Federal Attorney General in order to prevent another witness Jay. The first one is where closed court orders are sought from any court under the National Security Information Act, the Attorney General must be required to make submissions to the court to explain why such orders are appropriate and should be made having regard to the object of the act and on the one hand and the deeply rooted common law traditions of open court on the other. The second recommendation is that the act be amended to express that where closed court orders are sought the court has the power during argument as to whether there is to be a closed court to appoint a contradictor sometimes known as a special counsel or a special advocate to make submissions to the court as to whether an order should be made. The next recommendation of the Monitor is that orders made under the NSI Act be publicly available. In preparing this, I came upon a somewhat Kafkaesque reference to the fact that in the UK in a particular sealed off section of the main law library there is a section called Judgements in Secret Cases. It's walled off. No indication as to how you get to it but at least the fact that Judgements in Secret Cases exist in the UK is a little better than here. The final recommendation that the Monitor make is that where closed court orders are sought from any court the Attorney General be required to argue to the judge and the judge be required to give reasons for making an order. You wouldn't think that's a particularly radical proposal but as I'll come to in a minute no lesser person than a former head of ASIO said in a review of ASIO and other legislation two years ago that too many people in the intelligence services just don't have an appreciation, some not at all and many not a proper appreciation of the balance between properly protecting national security on the one hand and on the other hand properly protecting principles of open justice. In the Bernard Colliery case Anthony Whaley who's presided over several of Australia's recent terrorism trials prior to his retirement said in October 2019 quote, this could be one of the most secretive trials in Australian history. There was something like 1717 interlocutory proceedings that is legal argument proceedings before Colliery was to go to trial prior to the Attorney General ordering that the case be dismissed almost all of them are the subject of non-publication and suppression orders. The National Security Act creates special procedures by which national security information can be protected while at the same time being used as evidence in court. Let's look at the definition of national security in this act. It is defined as any information relating to Australia's defence, maybe okay, security, whatever that means, international relations, bugging the team or embassy or cabinet room or law enforcement interests. Now look at the definition again. National security information in the act is defined as any information relating to international relations, security or law enforcement interests. Those of us who live through Queensland in the 70s and 80s saw what sort of interests law enforcement saw as being theirs. Law enforcement interests are such a wide concept that one of the things that I want to see come out of the recently announced review of the NSI Act by Donaldson is a significantly cut down, cold definition of what is for the purpose of the NSI Act defined as security information. There are two circumstances in which the NSI procedures can be triggered. The first is when the parties know in advance they are likely to reveal national security information during the trial. In that case, the parties must notify the attorney general of this and if you don't, two years in prison. The second set of circumstances relates to when a witness is actually being questioned on the stand and an answer has the potential to reveal national security information. If the lawyer or the defendant knows this and how many lawyers or defendants, particularly lawyers, are given information about national security, if the lawyer or defendant knows this could happen, he or she must stop the witness from answering and notifying the court. Afraid to do this, two years in prison. In either of these circumstances, the attorney general can issue a non-disclosure certificate that prohibits the information from being revealed or allows it to be revealed in summary or redacted form. The court then holds a closed hearing in which the judge will determine whether and how the information may be used. In a closed hearing, not only are journalists and members of the public barred from attending, but so also are the jury. The judge may exclude the defendants, the defendants' lawyers or a court official if revealing information to them would be likely to compromise national security. Now look at that phrase, likely. And look at the wide definition of national security, a very wide definition. The main problem with the Act is that it creates a situation in which national security information can be used in a courtroom without the defendant, the defendant's lawyers, the jury, the media or the general public knowing the details of that information. The colliery, McBride and Boyle cases have to be seen as part of a new, wider trend, whereby evidence is being admitted into court and is available to one side, namely the prosecution in criminal matters, but not to the defence, even though that evidence may be used against the defence. The circumstances in which this evidence is selectively admitted is much broader than the previous law that existed prior to the bringing in of the National Security Act in 2004. Now the National Security Act, when it was brought in in 2004, was part of these 100 tranches of legislation has been referred to that have had the counter-terrorism label. One of the cynical aspects of this is that at the time that the NSI Act was introduced, the Australian Law Reform Commission announced that it was about to publish a major report dealing with official secrets. So what happened? The Independent Australian Law Reform Commission had been given a reference to look into Australia's secrecy laws, including as they affected national security. So what happened? The government went in first, brought in the National Security Act, and didn't allow the ALRC to publish its report and did not even consult them. It's no wonder we've got an act that is so problematic. The trend of increasing availability of secret evidence coincides with a dramatic increase in the use of civil proceedings that can result in severe penalties on people. Federally, control orders, which can in effect restrict you to your home, preventive detention orders, and continuing detention orders. That is, keeping you in jail once you've done your full-time sentence for a terrorism offense. Those orders are done in the civil jurisdiction. So I can have a client who's been convicted of terrorism, who's done, say, 15 years, and that person can then be kept in jail on the basis of a continuing detention order based on the standard of proof in civil matters, which is 51%. The standard of proof in criminal matters, you'll never get a barrister to tell you this because they're too cautious. The phrase is beyond reasonable doubt, but the standard of proof in criminal matters is generally seen to be 95% plus. So we now have a system where people are being kept in jail beyond their full-time for terrorism offenses for the so-called ongoing detention orders based on evidence that has to be proved only to the balance of probabilities of 51%. In 2020, the former head of ASIO, Dennis Richardson, in carrying out a review of the legal framework of national intelligence, noted a tendency to over-classification of material. This is the former head of ASIO saying his own former body and other intelligence bodies had a tendency to over-classify, and he has urged that that be remedied. One of the main arguments that we are putting forward in the Civil Liberties Council is that in the current review that the monitor has announced of the entire National Security Information Act is that the intelligence agencies be bound as a matter of law rather than just being expected to do the right thing to stop this over-classification. Times against me, thanks very much. Thank you very much, Terry Gorman. I don't know about you all sitting in the audience, but the fire in my belly is well and truly stoked now. Hearing all those details about that NSI, thank God there's a review happening. I wonder if they are seeking public consultations. Often they do when they do a review. We'll have to find out. OK, so that brings us to our final speaker for this session. Most of you here today probably consider whistleblowers to be heroes, so let's call him a hero, and if you're not sure about whether or not he's a hero, he's got the boots today to prove it. I was looking at those before. They're definitely hero boots. This is David McBride about to take to the stage now. His reputation probably does precede him. You will have heard of the Afghan files. We've heard of them several times this morning. Award-winning journalism work wouldn't have happened without David McBride, a former British Army major and Australian Army lawyer from 2014 to 2016. David McBride provided the Australian Broadcasting Corporation with the information about war crimes committed by Australian soldiers in Afghanistan that was later broadcast on four corners, and their show was called the Afghan Files. That was in 2017. But the case against Mr McBride has led to the highly publicised Australian Federal Police raid, not long after that, two years later on the ABC's Sydney headquarters. Very dramatic. And equally dramatic, no doubt, will be his upcoming trial in the ACT Supreme Court. That's due to start in November, where he's facing five charges, including theft, disclosing information in breach of the Crimes Act, and unlawfully giving classified information under the Defence Act. And I'm sure he'll let us know whether or not that's going to be a closed-door trial. Do we have to stand outside that door just banging on it the whole way through? We'll find out. Welcome, David McBride. Thank you, Mayor. And these are my lucky birds. I got them in a second-hand store, and they fit exactly. So I took that as my Cinderella moment. I'm still waiting for my princess to come and marry me. But the boots, I haven't lost a case in them yet, except for the PID case, which we didn't technically lose. Hearing the previous speakers, I'm very grateful to Terry and to AJ and to Greg. It's a depressing picture. I mean, a lot of the time as part of my self-preservation, I don't think about the details. And it's occasionally, when you hear it being spoken about, the situation that it sinks in, it is bad. The situation is dire in Australia. And it will get worse. There is no adult supervision on these laws. And while the politicians and while AJ kindly says, you know, they're some of them are pretty good people, but some of them, they pass these things, and some do we would have come in and said, oh, we need to have a law which says, in case there's very, very secret information that the jury can't hear it and the defence can't hear it. And they've gone, oh, yeah, OK, that sounds good. Can't have these collegiate Sheikh Mohammed, you know, hearing about it. And the irony is, and again, it says so much about our system. Our enemies, our truly dangerous enemies, hate us and want to bomb us and spend years going about their actions because they say we pretend to follow the law. We pretend we love democracy and free speech. But in actual fact, we are a sinister group run by corporations who actually put people in jail without the benefit of law and based on all sorts of spurious racist grounds. And in order to combat that, we've enacted laws which prove our enemies exact points. We have become, whether we always were, we have become the people our enemies used to hate us for being. We have become the dystopian world where we put people who point out terrible murders like Julian Assange, stripping down to the essential elements of Julian Assange's case. He pointed out that the US government murdered people and instead of there being any justice, the US government is going to murder him, and it gets worse, and the so-called bright lights of our democracy, the New York Times, the Washington Post, et cetera, are going to cheer him, cheer the government on while Julian Assange dies. That's our world. Anthony Albanese, born in a council flat out there to fight for the battler. He's cheering them on while they do it. It doesn't that make your skin crawl? It absolutely makes my skin crawl, and while I've got two teenage daughters who will struggle without me, I'm not here to avoid going to jail. I'm here to get changed.  It's not good enough if they just drop the charges and slink away.  I'm not going to be satisfied if they just slink away into the bushes. I'm here to kill this monster, and that may mean going to trial. It may mean being jailed. That is often the way we get changed. That is often, I mean, distinguished, as the speakers were before. AJ Brown wrote more or less the Public Interest Disclosure Act. He's very modest, he doesn't say that, but I can recognise his work in it. And it was kind of ironic when he had a witness statement against my prosecution in that, because he knew exactly how the act worked. But of course they didn't let it in, and that's likely is what's going to happen in my trial. I've got a good judge, I've got a good court, and I always try to say this, the police have been very fair with me, I've got no problem with the AFP, but the dweebs from the ASIO and ASIS will stop any evidence which helps me getting in under national security, as Terry said. And it's funny, that's obviously a bit of a sore point. So when you write to your local MPs say, I don't want secret trials in this country, because they don't like that. And they keep saying about my case, and they'll probably write us a letter after this speech. It's not a secret trial. It's not a secret trial, but as Terry pointed out, we're only going to close the court in any relation, when any matter comes up, which is to do with security. Now this is a case about what went on in Afghanistan during a war, and you reckon how much, even where the toilets were on the base is what they call security.   And for those of you who don't realize, there is me and my team in a courtroom about as big as this room. There is the Commonwealth Director of Public, where the speakers are. And over there, and there's six of them, is a whole other group of lawyers from the Attorney General's Department. And guess who they represent? Our international partners. Isn't that sickening? Isn't that absolutely sickening? And my lawyers said, don't mention the international partners and I'll put you in jail. It's the Americans. The Americans are running my case. Isn't that disgusting? Isn't that disgusting? My grandfather, and most people here, father or father or great-grandfather, fought in the First World War. He came back relatively unscathed, mentally and physically. He had a piece of shrapnel in him, but he never gave up on Australia. He was a suburban, small businessman, had a corner block, liked to mow his lawn with a push mower and had a rose garden. And his eldest, he had the terrible job of having to send his eldest son to the Second World War, which must have been terrible for his wife. And she had mental health issues, I think partly as a result of that. Her fiance went off to the First World and her eldest son went to the Second World War and I think that maybe sent her over the edge. My father was too young. Now, you know the story of my father. My father, he became a world-renowned person. He got a scholarship to go to Sydney University. That wouldn't have happened in America. We're becoming more and more American. He worked in a public hospital, and he was so proud of that. He could have gone and worked in America after he got famous from Lidemite, but he chose not to. And I thought it was quite strange when I was growing up. I thought it wouldn't be great. He was teaching at Harvard. He didn't want that. He knew about America and Australia, and he knew Australia was better. He wanted his kids to be Australian. I went to good schools. I went to Oxford University. I went to Santerst. I was a soldier on the streets of Northern Ireland. My enemies liked to paint me as some sort of bookish person. It couldn't handle a bit of blood. I saw blood. I got killed in Northern Ireland. I went out to Africa after that, and I worked as a security consultant at the diamond business. I've seen blood. I was in Rwanda in 94. I've seen blood. But what I saw in the Australian military, and it wasn't the war crimes, that's part of it, was a complete politicisation of our military, where we didn't care about the truth. We made heroes of people that weren't heroes, knowing that, we made villains of people that weren't villains. And it was actually the scapegoating of soldiers, putting good soldiers in jail because it would help the ministers get a bump in the pole. That just disgusted me. And that's what it's like. All of the shenanigans on now, it's not about China. It's about trying to make them look more popular. The submarines are a way of getting us into the U.S. gang. It's a protection racket. And once we save you, what the subs? We are tied to the Americans forever. Yeah. What I want to do, I want to thank you for being here. We are the 300 Spartans. We are a minority.  But it's those minorities. It's those tough dogged minorities that believe in principles that we don't win.  We will still win because there are some things that are more important in life than just going along with the government being fat, dumb and happy. It is much better to stand up for what is right. I want to thank you because it's like a football team and while I'm the one that has to go to jail, I don't do it alone. I would be dead without the supporters.  By coming here, by staying interested in the case, by saying hello, you are every bit as much a part of this revolution of truth as I am. And I want to thank you. I can't do without you and you can be very proud. If you do nothing else, you can be very proud of this moment in history where you stood up to be counted for what is right. Thank you very much, David McBride. That concludes the speeches for the first session and we now have some time, very limited time, for questions from the audience. I think we have two volunteers with wireless microphones. Both of you are over here. So, we have a hand up right down the front here. I don't know if... They're just grabbing the microphones, I think. Lovely. I see. Well, perhaps the first question could come from the gentleman up the back there. I think he wanted to ask a question. Is that right, sir? No? Okay, down here. No, no, no. Because it's being recorded, please do wait for the microphone to come to you. Testing. Okay. You can say your name if you'd like. That makes it friendly, but you don't have to. You can stay anonymous. My name is James Victor Grouch. It's a very unusual name so I'm proud of it. I'm representing the Citizens Party and I'm nervous. Sorry. My question is where is the consideration of constitutional law? Where is the discussion on administrative law? And I once read a book called The Spycatcher Case. It was written by Malcolm Turnbull. I've heard the name before. He defended a book writer and he essentially gave defence against the Crown and succeeded in the Supreme Court. Can we get involved here? Could he help here to defend Australian citizens as well? That is a rhetorical question. Am I off the point here? The Constitution and we're part of the Crown. We've got a new king. Can you help us? Can somebody look into what's happening in Australia? How come we got it so wrong? I think Greg Barnes would be well qualified to answer some of the points, to address some of those points that you have raised but we have our speakers with some mics here on the... You've got your mic there. And I think that our professor is happy to have a first go. Greg Barnes did explain some of the problem by emphasising the case for a Federal Human Rights Act. The trouble is that we've got a Constitution that protects very few rights. We do have an implied freedom of political communication that the High Court has recognised out of our Constitution. That's actually quite critical. I think if a lot of these sorts of cases ever made it to the High Court the High Court might well cut through all of this legislative maze. All of these 100 pieces of legislation all these defective bits of whistleblowing legislation and actually re-write the rules quite dramatically depending on the balance of the Court at the time. But some High Courts at different times probably would do that. But it shouldn't take that because we should have the fundamental principles if not set out in the Constitution set out the preeminent principles set out in legislation. Terry hit the nail on the head when you pointed out the former head of ASIO who said that there's too many people involved in controlling how all this works who don't understand the fundamental balance between whatever the interest in secrecy is and whatever the actual public interest is or the interests of open justice. And that's really what's happening here. It's in the case of the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions there's all these cases that we're hearing about raise this fundamental question about where does the public interest lie in all of this. So part of this legislative reform and strengthening that we're talking about has to reiterate the fundamental principles so that the public interest open justice truth actually get to prevail to cut through all of that. But it's a mixture of getting it right in the reform in doing away with some of these laws in reforming these laws and then getting these principles constitutionally if not constitutionally at least enshrined in more fundamental laws like Human Rights Act. So I think you're on the right track and it emphasises some fundamental weakness with the way that our legal system works in the absence of having those sorts of constitutional or fundamental law protections for the fundamental principles. Thank you very much Professor Browning. I've just been informed that given we had a slightly late start that we don't have as much time for questions right now as we had planned so we'll take one more question and then we'll take a break so if you're going to be hanging around during the break I'm sure that our speakers are friendly enough and passionate enough to take your unsolicited questions. Can I get a nod? Is that okay? Are our speakers here? Yeah. Sorry. We just need to make sure we've got the microphone because it's being recorded. Beautiful. Hold your microphone up nice and close so that everybody can hear. Oh Hart, maybe the volunteer could hold the microphone for you. That'd be lovely. 13 years ago, I want to say this this is the background of the Australian Government have a chaos fear and then we do left we give it the left and we take with the right. This is the Government diversion, diversion, diversion divide and conquer controlled opposition that's how they live and you know what we go around and round and round in circle supporting them with that kind of philosophy. 13 years ago I was with a group of girls who were doing no jab, no pay for the children and I was doing vaccination and I was coming out of an entertainment centre and going down the M1 and they detoured me I'll try and do it quickly. They detoured me they took me back on the M1 and there was a bitumen one of those huge machines travelling alongside of me that's where it started I was absolutely terrified I did two runs and my my computer was hacked twice so 13 years in the 13 years there's been 24 friends of mine that have gone on the take because the powers that be who run the government they decided to go to friends of mine who would upend information about what I was doing 20 23 people anyway so it's been I've been totally and utterly upended I am now in a situation where they can't stop me so they've decided to shovel radiation into my home let me tell you you are all being radiated you're being oxidised and radiated because the weather is interfered with can I ask what your question is? what's your question? I just want to share this I've been running short on time there'll be another question in the entrance section later so okay thank you thank you for coming along as a whistleblower that does conclude our first session the next session is due to start at 3pm back here there are some toilets that away and a cafe downstairs and I'll see you back at 3pm our next speaker like Greg Barnes sadly can't be here she's Kelly Tranta a lawyer and activist she stood as an independent candidate for the New South Wales Parliament so down in New South Wales where I live with an unsolicited endorsement of her candidature by the anti-corruption fighter John Hatton Kelly Tranta regularly contributes political and social commentary to public affairs websites like the ABC's The Drum Independent Australia National Times and online opinion and has written for New Matilda as well as the Australia Institute Kelly Tranta has been unable to get a flight from Newcastle on a Sunday it turns out so there you go but she has sent us a YouTube clip from the Belmarsh Tribunal which we're going to watch now I begin tonight by recognising the significance of this tribunal to Julian and his family it is also very timely as we have reached a critical point in history for press freedom and for all human rights intertwined with it Julian once said quote I understood this a few years ago and my view became that we should understand is a part of the US it is part of this English-speaking Christian empire the centre of gravity of which is the United States the second centre of which is the UK and Australia is a suburb in that arrangement and therefore we shouldn't go it's completely hopeless it's completely lost we can't control the big regulatory structure which we're involved in in terms of strategic alliances and mass surveillance and so on we can understand that our capital is Washington the capital of Australia is DC that's the reality so when we're engaging in campaigns just engage directly with DC because that's where the decisions are made and that's what I do and that's what WikiLeaks does we engage directly with DC we engage directly with Washington and that's what Australians should do close quotes that is to say our relationship with the United States has long ceased to be an alliance as opposed to an amalgamation with an inferior status Julian's proposition is validated by the freedom of information documents I've obtained and examined over almost a decade unfortunately our intelligence agencies whose records would be of great interest are exempt from the FOI legislation when I started preparing for tonight I ended up with a story too long to tell here it will be published on Declassified Oz this evening and I invite you to read it there it tells a story not the whole story of institutionalized pre-judgment perceived rather than actual risks and complicity through silence my inference from the records I've examined is that our government's real policy on Julian's persecution is complicit in activity in deferring to the US in action is the policy an example is Julian withdrawing his consent for the use and disclosure of his personal information on the 13th of June 2019 the Department of Foreign Affairs and trade has always been aware of the reasons his lawyers wrote to the Australian High Commission on the 24th of October 2019 pointing out his general entitlement to confidentiality for medical information and explaining why he didn't want Belmarsh to disclose it that letter is discussed on Julian's consular file at no stage did Julian block or refuse consular assistance in fact during a visit by consular officers on the 1st of November 2019 after he withdrew his consent Julian raised his concerns about false reports from DFAT in the media that he had rejected offers of consular visits they told him the issue of consular visits was raised during senate estimates and the department responded that four offers of consular visits had been made and not been responded to but the media reported that he had blocked consular visits four years later on the 16th of February this year our foreign minister is perpetuating this mis-truth by saying that Julian does not want consular representation at this stage from the Australian Government the record shows this is wrong there's no impediment to consular officers visiting Julian in prison they have done so after he withdrew consent for medical information disclosure and they've also contacted prison authorities about his health and well-being the documents prove the misrepresentation whether careless or deliberate individuals direct a state for every reasonable request that has been disregarded for chairs that have remained empty when they required the presence of active observers for every international law finding ignored for every record that remains uncorrected for turning away when an Australian life has been threatened and for the silence that has descended in the face of injustice I say to many former and current senior public servants and ministers across many departments that you may have no shame now but history will hold you accountable dealing with Julian's case his very life through the prism of international policy considerations and strategic alliances rather than objective considerations of truth, justice and actual circumstances is what the FOI documents suggest and it's a continuing institutionalised mistake a primary precept of good government is justice for its citizens our government has ignored every injustice in his case injustice now threatens us all with a precedent whereby the US can seek to capture by any means incarcerate and extradite anyone including journalists or publishers of any nationality from most places in the world for disclosing shockingly reprehensible US secrets by courageously publishing the truth Julian terrified with a threat of personal responsibility and accountability those who had been operating beyond reach he knew they'd come for him we knew they'd come for him and they did it's not a hard story to understand Julian is a moral innovator he made moral gains which had an immense effect on human life he did what lay in his power to make people less cruel to others nothing but personal pain posterity will pay Julian the highest honour for putting into the world the things that we most value truth, transparency and justice history will look back on Julian as a particularly important person and on his persecution the details of which undoubtedly will be further filled out over time and preserved forever as an appalling legal abomination harking back to Julian's own observations about the real international hierarchy the way forward is in Washington not Canberra Mr Albanesey goes to Washington could and should be the story of an Australian Prime Minister quietly but resolutely standing up for truth and fairness and the rights of a citizen and securing his release the release of a person who far from being a criminal has put his life on the line for those same values for the benefit of people the world over thank you very much so Kelly Trender is obviously a journalist and this session is all about journalist's role sorry oh yes sorry but has also worked had her work published I should that that is true she is a lawyer who has worked extensively with journalists I should say as I was saying earlier she's had her contributed to the likes of ABC the drama independent Australia national times and online opinion and has also written for New Matilda and the Australia Institute which in the opinion of some would make her a journalist and I guess the segue here is our next speaker Dr John Jiggins calls himself a citizen journalist so a citizen journalist and an historian so his PhD is called marijuana, Australia cannabis use, popular culture and the Americanization of drugs policy in Australia it's a history of cannabis prohibition in Australia and just another fabulous connection between Queensland and the Northern Rivers he's a self-described minor god of cannabis not that we have any cults on the Northern Rivers he's published several books on the history of the genus including Sir Joseph Banks and the question of Hemp the killer cop and the murder of Daniel Mackay and also co-authored with Jack Herrer the Australian version of the Emperor wears no clothes as a citizen journalist he's the founding editor of the Cain Toad Times which sadly is no longer in publication so if you're a lucky holder of a vintage copy of the Cain Toad Times I hope you've got it framed on the wall the graphics are gorgeous if nothing else and also the West Ender the founding editor of the West Ender he's currently my colleague working in the community newsroom at Bay FM Community Radio in Byron Bay and also a contributor to National Community Radio Service The Wire and also you haven't written it here but independent Australia and pearls and irritations please welcome Dr John Jiggins who has been covering the persecution of Julian Assange since it started I know what I'll do to them if they go over time okay a revolution in journalism Julian Assange and WikiLeaks by Dr John Jiggins According to Dr Soulette Dreyfuss Julian Assange was the most original voice in 21st century journalism she justified her claim by referencing the invention of the anonymous digital drop box that WikiLeaks and Assange pioneered which allowed whistleblowers to transfer information to the public while preserving their anonymity This invention was widely imitated by copycats like the New York Times and the ABC who never defended Assange or his journalism and treat his outrageous persecutions as a normal outcome of a justice system The Walkley Award to WikiLeaks in 2011 for outstanding contributions to journalism cited the invention of the digital drop box The judges said this innovation could just as easily have been developed by any of the world's major publishers but it wasn't yet so many eagerly took advantage of the secret cables to create more scoops in a year than most journalists could imagine in a lifetime As well as the digital drop box WikiLeaks pioneered analyzing large data sets in a collaborative way with the massive Cablegate files working with a global coalition that included 89 major publications including the New York Times The Guardian, LeMond and LaPublica Yet while this famous Australian journalist is being tortured to death slowly crucified by the governments of the UK and the US facing the ludicrously vengeful punishment of 175 years in prison there is no outcry of support from our media for over a decade zero support Instead he is subjected to ludicrous insults like the ridiculous claim that he is not really a journalist Julian Assange has won 24 major awards for journalism and social activism receiving glowing endorsements from the most powerful journalists in the world Assange restored to journalism its noblest ideal an ideal that has been increasingly perverted and debased by the corporate media in their quest for power the idea of journalists as a fourth estate In the 18th century the English government was based on three estates the clergy, the House of Lords and the House of Commons The idea of journalists as a fourth estate serving as a public watchdog and informing the citizenry about their government emerged in the revolutionary era during the transition from monarchy to democracy when journalists like Tom Paine inspired the American Revolution urging the 13 colonies to break away from the British Empire and govern themselves The legacy of these courageous journalists was the first amendment to the US Constitution which guarantees the right to free speech and a free press a guarantee that is under its greatest attack now with the persecution of Julian Assange who is being brutally punished for the crime of journalism The Walkley panel acknowledged this aspect of Assange's journalism too they said this year's winner has shown a courageous and controversial commitment to the finest tradition of journalism justice through transparency WikiLeaks applied new technology to penetrate the inner workings of government to reveal an avalanche of inconvenient truths in a global publishing coup It's revelations on how the war and terror was being waged to diplomatic bastardry, high level and the interference in the domestic affairs of nations have had an undeniable effect The corporate media avoid condemning Assange's persecution partly through jealousy but largely because of their anger at being revealed to be corrupt warmongers who are serially dishonest and massively compromised In the countries that separate us from Tom Payne and the American Revolution journalism became dominated by giant corporations and family dynasties like Packers and the Murdochs These press barons misuse their media power to spin the news to become powerful political actors boosters of their choosing politicians and policies What matters for the corporate journalists they employ was not truth but the narrative the corporate agenda demanded The Murdoch press has become the most powerful political party in Australia according to former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull Another former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd described them as cancer eating the heart of Australian democracy Murdoch's empire has a near monopoly in Queensland controlling not just the curia mail but every newspaper in regional Queensland The first world war further deformed corporate journalism as the state harvested the propaganda power of the corporate media to convince young men everywhere to slaughter each other on an industrial scale Journalists of this era were christened the stenographers of power who published the dictates of the war boosters unquestioningly The second world war intensified this marriage between the deep state and the corporate media When Britain's ally against Hitler's Germany was Stalin's Soviet Union The British press lauded Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and christened him Uncle Joe Alarmed by the valorisation of Stalin one conservative confronted Churchill Don't worry Churchill replied and turned it on and off like a tap and they did Uncle Joe became the new Hitler then Chairman Mao Uncle Ho Saddam Hussein Osama bin Laden Colonel Gaddafi Syria's Bashar al-Assad as the endless wars rolled on In 2003 every newspaper in Australia campaigned for the Iraq war a crime of military aggression against a sovereign nation which constitutes the ultimate war crime Their embedded journalists reported the war from the perspective of the US military until WikiLeaks revealed their lies with the collateral murder video and the Iraq war logs These revelations made WikiLeaks famous and made Assange the target of the Five Eyes Over the past year our media has recklessly campaigned for a war with China According to the China Hawks 2027 is the year penciled in for this war This flock of vultures circle our planet raucously squawking Orwell's famous paradox that war is peace In 2006 Julian Assange unleashed his revolution in journalism by adopting the fourth estate ideal of journalism that the mainstream media had abandoned Instead of causing wars WikiLeaks stopped them The persecution of Julian Assange is intended as a message from the Five Eyes to make journalists afraid to reveal war crimes Because he exposed their crimes Assange has been treated as the most dangerous man in the world Thank you These lights are blinding me bright Anyway, in conclusion I want to thank all the speakers who have come to support Julian Assange and all those who have helped organise this event and all of you who have come here too to contribute at this perilous time in history when our big brothers are preparing us for another massive war Thank you very much Dr John Jiggins Dr John Jiggins, incidentally has organised quite a few forums similar to this over the past few years but rarely actually gets up and speaks himself so hopefully we'll get to hear from you more often And our next speaker is Michael West Journalist Michael West spent two decades working as a journalist a stockbroker, an editor and a finance commentator before striking out on his own in July 2016 and I hope that everybody here has had an opportunity to check out the amazing work at MichaelWest.com one of the few dedicated investigative journalism outlets left in Australia After eight years as a commentator with the Australian and another eight years with a professor journalist and editor he founded his website Michael West Media and the focus there it is mostly investigative journalism but it's also really focused on high public interest stories He's a Walkley Award winner and an Arjunct Professor at the University of Sydney School of Social and Political Sciences Please welcome Michael West Thank you, Mia and our respects to the traditional landholders What a privilege it is to be speaking on behalf of Julian Assange and of course our great hero here David McBride David's still here and these guys being persecuted for doing the right thing for going beyond the call of duty as a journalist one of the great things is you get the privilege of being able to come into people's lives at the moment of their greatest triumph and tragedy and turmoil and so it is that over the years I've got to know many whistleblowers some who've never been whose identities have never been made known who have gone beyond the call of duty to bring some kind of public good via the media by exposing things They put often their lives and families at risk Julian of course is the most famous of all of these and he's a symbol of something which is as our excellent legal speakers earlier and John pointed out it's become something different now it's become a real worry and the reason that it is that if I could just make a few observations about the way the media is going it's probably my only area of real expertise here being a journalist you just catch other people's intellectual property and other typing skills but what we've got here is a changing business model the incursion of the internet the early 2000s completely changed the business model when I was at Fairfax last between 2008 and 2016 before being ostracised for the crime of journalism and having to go out of my own and become a small businessman and being the world's worst small businessman I I got to see this firsthand I got to see all the people that were made redundant over the years five redundancy programs in eight years as I recall it what's happened here and this goes to the treatment of Julian Assange and David indeed and others in the media and the increasing proximity of the media to the political classes they've always been close because of course the media are their messengers and in Australia particularly we have a media duopoly or this high concentration of effectively the Fairfax now the nine media empire nine entertainment and the Murdoch press particularly in Queensland and South Australia this concentration is really really bad as John just pointed out so there's a grip by a couple of very large corporations on the media and yes there is social media there are independent media outlets like myself but the way that this works is and this particularly got worse under the Scott Morrison ratio because previously before Morrison came along the Prime Minister's office and the Treasurer's office they would simply farm out stories drop their scoops or their leaks or their plants or their drops is the usual terminology to their favourite journalists and to transmit the message properly and bury the but the bad side of this policy might be said somebody wrote at the very bottom of the story so the headliner that's the placement of the stories the way the headlines of photos are used which are also very powerful as we know it fell apart at the last election because despite the mainstream media and seven as well barracking for the coalition there was a movement away from the major parties and despite this avid barracking for the Morrison government they got turfed out which was a great thing so it's heading in the right direction and I do have hopes for it but as the lawyers today have pointed out there's a real problem with the apparatus of state and the way that the laws are being both legislated for a start and then executed the way that it works is the media under Morrison he began instead of dropping to either news everyone the next day would come and challenge and go to labour and say what do you think about this there was a war between those two they were rivals that all stopped under Morrison he just got them all in about the 10 people in the press club in Calvary so I'm going to just drop it to you all of you every night and they still put their exclusive tags on it but what it meant was that the next day at four o'clock in the morning when the news TV people got up the producers got up they just look at the front pages and then their news agenda would go from there you know gas fracking good Julian Assange not good whatever the agenda was and so under this scheme the mainstream media became ever closer to government at a time and you might have noticed lately that their paywalls are now getting tighter the Fairfax paywalls you can't even get around them virtually at all except to see a first paragraph or so they're getting tighter and so this public interest journalism has been quarantined just for their paying subscribers but the ABC and SBS and 2GB and all the radio stations they pick it up the next day and they run with whatever that agenda is so this little funnel the prime minister's office increasingly now is disseminating a nicely crafted message for the media mates a little cabal and they are getting picked up by the rest of the media and by the time you've got more critical people or experts able to to analyse it properly and look at it objectively the media cycle has moved on so that's how they're doing it now my hopes are that there is going to be now there is citizen journalism and it's becoming more mature there's more independent media outlets and so on that this will continue to challenge the mainstream media because they don't have a business model they're getting propped up by government subsidies via the digital media bargaining code etc they're not really viable without their scoops from government and without their public subsidies and digital media bargaining code transfer of money from Google and Facebook over to News Corp and Fairfax they're propped up by government despite all their free speech rhetoric that's all hypocrisy they're on a gravy train and of course as their revenues have been under challenge big corporations have got bigger and there's a falling confidence public confidence in large institutions because of the way the media and government have got closer together social media is shaking all that up so we can only hope the social independent media will continue to rise and for my part I think it has to the internet's like the blob if you hit it in one place it bulges out in another you can't really beat it the only challenge really is this kind of shenanigans with lawyers and so on they've got to shut people down I get about three to five defamation threats every year it's quite a simple thing they threaten you, you look at it, you go this is going to cost me if it went to court it went all the way half a million dollars I lose my house that's it and that is the risk every time that's what they're saying to you every time they come at you whether it's a gas fracking company like Tamburan Resources or a US Texan oil billionaire threatening a small media operator in Australia defamation threats people on Twitter or Facebook have been threatened too by lawyers it's an easy one for a lawyer a couple of thousand bucks for a corporate client to muzzle somebody these are big threats there needs to be defamation law reform but I'm hopeful that in the end because of the internet people's voices will be heard for a few years people don't trust the mainstream anymore it doesn't have the credibility it used to and it's closer to government so there's a lot of darkness going around particularly with the persecution of McBride and Julian Assange and others, Richard Boyle and many others but there's great hope there as well I'm happy to take some questions thanks thanks very much Michael West my name again since I'm about to join these two journalists on stage, I'm Mia Armitage I'm a reporter down in Byron Bay Northern New South Wales for an independent newspaper and online publication called Echo Publications you may know of the Byron Shire Echo it has been around a while I also work at Bay FM Community Radio Station Dr John Jiggins is one of my colleagues he's part of that team mostly around the Northern Rivers region but also across the country and again an invitation to anyone who is interested in community journalism please reach out to Bay FM and I'll put you in touch with me but please don't hit me up today because I'm already feeling quite overstimulated I'm going to get my David Spiers or Barry Cassidy on now and sit down here this Sunday after all so this can be our own little version of Insiders ask a couple of questions and that might get you thinking of a couple of questions that you may have in particular for Michael West since he's travelled a long way to be with us today and Michael West before I sit down I might put the first question to you and that's about this idea of the drop in case you've forgotten the drop is but more or less when a politician gives a tip-off an exclusive tip-off to a journalist or in the case as Michael West was saying of Prime Minister Scott Morrison ten journalists got to be in that drop club drop club there you go so I remember asking I got to interview Barry Cassidy former host, founding host of Insiders at the Byron Riders Festival last year I asked him, he spoke passionately of the drop but I said well in 18 years you know as someone considered the political insider for journalism very much inside the Canberra press bubble did you not receive a drop he was adamant absolutely not and he never wanted to receive a drop he found the concept disgusting I also heard quite a lot of senior journalists talk about the change in the journalism industry you've mentioned quite a few changes that the government sees and the changes that the internet has brought with it in social media so when it comes to practices like receiving a drop Michael West how do you think journalists these days can produce outstanding work like your own without access to things like the drop what's the new what's the best and most effective global way of getting around that the point of the drop really is that it's a vanity thing because there's nothing journalists like more to see than I am their byline on the front page of the newspaper I can still remember my first front page of the FIN review 20 or 30 years ago it's a great thrill you become important because you're the person that has got the scoop and so on but of course when you become a bit cynical you look at it and go black bloke's just been given the pressure released a day early and there were literally we know the names of them the FIN review, Harold H the Australian ABC we know the people who get the drops and often these days the point of what Morrison did was he didn't give them to one journalist or two journalists exclusively they're now giving them all to a bunch of journalists about three o'clock in the morning that's when they press the button and then the radio people get up in the morning and the TV people and they then take the news agenda from there so it's already been set and then often the last government was notoriously bad corrupt and incompetent this one's not in that league at all it's trying to do a better job but the system is persisting now where they're just dropping the news and by the time the actual policy detail is out so you've got a chance to look at the thing properly and do journalism which is trying to be objective looking at the evidence the message has already been sent the PR has been done from government and that's the problem they've just got everybody wrapped around their little pinky but thankfully on Twitter and other channels there's a lot of good debate going on which sometimes swings a bit too far in the other direction but corrects the record and it sounds like you're advising journalists to take advantage of Twitter Well they do but they're all muscled now so this is the problem of institutionalisation because 10 years ago on Twitter the journalists used to be having fights all the time disagreeing with each other and so these days they're bound by social media policy if they get into a Twitter a debate with somebody and it gets nasty or personal there could be a breach of their social media policy so that's all finished now you never see anybody they're all leaving Twitter the mainstream journalists not all of them but most of them are still some notable big profile ones from the ABC and so on have left Yeah okay I want to talk now about your work as well Michael West because one of the other threats that journalists are faced by in this country in doing their work is defamation you mentioned defamation do you know how many times you've been threatened with defamation and doing your work and yeah Well it would be triple figures probably by now it's been quite a few I do I used to keep a file but most of them are just letters from a lawyer it's usually the same lawyer bobs up all the time and it says private and confidential you must do this take down the story apologise in words of our proving pay our costs of threatening you with this letter and so I call them I say thank you very much but let's discuss the actual facts of what your claim is here and of course they shy away because there's nothing a lawyer they're bold keyboard warriors with their little emails but there's nothing they hate more than getting a phone call from one of their victims saying well let's talk about it how many times have you actually followed up on their threat well I often depending on the case if there's something wrong or that I've been unfair we just correct it immediately and that's the good thing about online it's not like the fishrapper which sticks around forever you just in order to show that you've been fair but usually it's a freedom of speech thing and they just try to muzzle you private and confidential and as I point out to them you're not allowed to send somebody a threat and say it's an unsolicited threat which this threat is and say it's private and confidential so I often just take a nice screenshot of it and put it straight on Twitter private and confidential So does defamation scare you I mean you've been in the trade a couple of decades now does it ever stop you from doing the work that you do and I'm asking you that because I think it's important that any other journalists out there who may not be as experienced as you know whether or not they need to be as scared of defamation as perhaps they are and should they be that scared? well you've got to have a risk appetite for it I mean there's people being sued and money? I don't have any money and I'm making a go of it you've got to be prepared if you look at some of the younger people Jordan Shanks for instance he doesn't have any assets he doesn't have any kids so nothing to lose he hasn't got anything to lose and that's why he goes hard he can go very hard you've got to really watch out if you've got one asset that they can come after that's the purpose of it the purpose of it is to scare you so that you take down the story and no longer circulating in public I'm going to come back to the drop now because if that is scary and you need to be either someone with nothing to lose or someone with lots of money to be able to fight defamation I could kind of understand why some journalists will be like I'll just take the drop I'm not going to get done for defamation if I'm just quoting exactly what the Prime Minister has told me so quite extreme I've done to get these defamation laws improved so that journalists and whistleblowers are protected and don't worry John we're going to come to you next I'm dying to know whether you were ever threatened with defamation at the canto times oh we'll go to the Q&A after this then well it's just they've got to change the laws or it's not going to get any better I mean the defamation law seriously Australia pumps out a lot of lawyers and the no-win, no-fee crew as well they're running around you know that's why I was so thrilled to be here today to hear the good lawyers talking because the really is the thing that I threaten them with is because I've got an audience I can threaten them back with the Streisand Effect the Streisand Effect where Barbara Streisand complained about a small publication that was critical of her and a regional thing and it became a global story and she complained about it because she complained her complaint became the story so the Streisand Effect is they know that like Angus Taylor threatened me a couple of years ago I went thank you Angus put it straight on Twitter private confidential Angus Taylor and I didn't hear from Angus again so it was wonderful so it's kind of like fighting defamation by really ramping it up well yeah but not everyone can do that not everyone can do that so if you haven't got a large audience to threaten them and who wants to do that anyway very few people unlike myself get a thrill out of it so the answer is they need to change the laws because it favours the big institutions they have big balance sheets they can afford compliance departments and lawyers to fight this stuff the Ben Robert Smith case has cost 40 million dollars and I wonder maybe if the stage might let us know an idea of how much that campaign is costing the fight for Julian Assange so well that would be wonderful to hear from John I mean there's a lot of goodwill for Julian a lot of civil society groups giving money to people like David and Julian probably never enough but if the cause is important like that then you can raise money that's another good thing the defamation laws that you're talking about haven't been around forever and I'm just wondering do you think if Julian Assange were here working as a journalist now that he'd been in a similar position to you just facing threats of defamation continuously absolutely no doubt I mean his stories were so big that they just shut he's next gen sort of level to what I am and other people the stuff that he was exposing clearly it's beyond defamation but in the US they don't have defamation laws you have to prove that the journalist is in malicious pursuit before you can sue them and I know that we have some cases where truth has been used as a successful defence here in Australia but let's go choose some questions from the audience and we have to remind you to use the microphone as it's being recorded the lights are blinding it's true I can't really see Jenny Jenny Jenny there's a person there with the microphone my name is Roy Drew I'm also from the Northern Rivers I'm just going to when you're talking about the whole social media being available I was just wondering what we thought about the pressure to self-censor and what do you make of the cancel culture for example self-censorship is huge absolutely huge you can see it every day on the ABC I know plenty of ABC journalists plenty of friends that are there over the years past and present they self-censor daily the problem with the ABC too isn't just defamation they've got this internal complaints procedure because they're a government agency or effectively a government corporation where the PR and lobby groups and lawyers and so on they know look what happened to Emerald Burici with the criticisms of Qantas and so on if you make one little mistake or even if you don't make a mistake and there's some grey area they can complain take it to the press council that ties up management time and so they get gun shy and that's the problem with the public broadcasters I'm a huge supporter but also a critic because they do self-censor a lot because they just don't want to get bullied by powerful vested interests and that's the problem it's the editors and producers judgment how far can we go you speak to the Four Corners people it's always a lot of stuff left on the cutting room floor Jenny thanks Jenny for the question I just I just didn't get the middle bit of it there can you ABC at the beginning of the year but Julian Assange the question is I missed the John Lyons John's actually an old friend of mine like John he's a great journalist he would be subject to a lot of self-censorship he goes pretty hard I'm sorry Jenny I'm just not I couldn't speak publicly about that because I just not acquainted with the facts of it I assume that it was he would have been misled by a source or there might have been something I'm sure he wouldn't have reported something that wasn't true but he didn't feel to be true so you know he may well have there may well have been I'd just be it'd be idle speculation but probably there was some intention somewhere to do the right thing and end this torture of Julian Assange but John would have reported on that with a background source and off the record source which ended up being wrong because there was a political backflip or something probably something on those lines but he's a good journalist he wouldn't have just made it up one more question then we'll have to start John I think everyone heard that one more question John the front here make sure you've got the microphone hello is that working now so my question is maybe for both of you you know especially relating to citizen journalism how do we incentivize the right conditions to create courage and virtue amongst our journalism because it feels like there's a culture of almost journalism being this status pursuit or something rather than for anything noble like truth or virtue or you know values so what can we do to incentivize that culture you can get a t-shirt like this which says which says courage is contagious and that's the thing about Julian's case like they're hoping fear is contagious which it is too and so they're just trying to make every journalist in the world frightened by persecuting Julian to this absurd and ludicrous level and I think you've just got to think I think what Julian said is courage is courageous courage is contagious and that's why I'm wearing this t-shirt as I get up here and talk great question on culture how do you sit here and talk all night about culture has changed and I know that from being in the corporate media now being on my own the corporations are closer to the executives are running it the quality of the management isn't they're not as independent they're not as smart as they used to be the editors and chief of the newspapers and so on they're on KPIs key performance indicators they get actually rewarded for cutting you know when they came after me I said to the guy the herald editor and I said mate so tell me you want to KPIs you want to KPIs for cost cutting in other words do you make money personally from sacking me and he just ultimately he wasn't such a bad guy this guy he was a he was a greasy pole climber so he admitted to me he said yes I do I have got a performance indicator based on cutting costs of my own stuff this is the problem everything's been corporatised so the culture has changed it's been a corporate culture but how do you marry a corporate culture with a culture where you're meant to be acting in the public interest not the interests of the shareholders of your company by being nice to coca-cola-ramital Qantas and Harvey Norman there's not very rigorous reporting of good old Harvey Norman going on out there in corporate media land but the culture has changed and that's not going to come back again it's now been more subsidised by government as well so it has to come from all of us from the public from social media independent media and growth of course government is the problem there as I said before if they keep on making bad laws look what happened to Jordan Shakespeare that's sort of his producer being bullied by the AFP because John Barolaro I mean this kind of thing and that does scare people and there is timidity in the culture now increasing timidity but people want to keep their jobs they've got to cost a living crisis they don't want to have to come home to their partner and say I've been sacked because I told the truth we're going to welcome our final speaker for today to the stage soon but before we do that just staying on that topic I just wanted to put to both of you that announcement towards the end of last year of an open letter to US President Joe Biden by the the head editors New York Times The Guardian Lamonda Disbeagle and Elle Pays I think I've got that right Pays Pays so that open letter to US President Joe Biden is calling for an end to the persecution of Julian Assange I know there are differing opinions as to the motivation for the letter do you Michael West see that as an encouraging change in the culture in media and Dr John Jiggins is that an example of courage that has gone contagious Well I'm answering first Yeah, in many ways when that John Lyons you know prophecy that Julian would be released in two months I believed it because he wouldn't do that unless he had a really good source and the source was said to be someone in the government so I thought Joe Biden could use that to sort of do that and sort of use that letter he'd got from the five newspapers to portray himself as a noble defender of free speech so I thought it was quite possible it didn't happen I noticed so that when a US journalist got arrested in Russia Joe Biden actually said journalism is not a crime Michael West I can't really answer that You didn't want to add to that one? What did you make of the letter, the open letter? You just get the feeling there's so much going on behind the scenes in various power negotiations that we've got Rex Patrick writing for us now and I loved all the lawyers talking about secrecy and so on before because Rex has now been doing stories, FOIs to find out why the secret has been made a secret He's doing investigations into cover-ups about cover-ups so it's got to the ridiculous phase and I think everyone knows even the Hawks they've got to know you can't let this bloke die in jail he will then be a martyr and he's being tortured and I sort of understand that it's a really terrible situation It is a terrible situation and this terrible situation is also a very human situation it's a real situation affecting a real life person who has family who love him and support him he has children his father is here today John Shipton is going to take to the stage now he's been giving speeches for a long time he's called he's become quite the master I must say last time he was down in Mullen Bimby I think everybody was hanging on his every word we even heard some poetry so if we're very lucky given it's the state library of Queensland it's a good place for poetry John Shipton would you like to come up to the stage now? Thanks for that the warm welcome David had a little bit of trouble with his gadget just on that last question we had Gabriel and I had an interview with I won't say his name but a writer for The Dishpeagle and they asked me questions about the press and I just said that the press fulfills a requirement of government to address certain areas so for example the Guardian addresses the people on the left the telegraph on the right and so on to institute government policy because you can't institute policy unless you've got a standing army they use the press that's what it's for so we I said that to this fella and he was a bit offended he was a bit offended and Gabriel said oh you know you've got people haven't done very much and you profited immensely so the conclusion of the conversation was that he would contact the publishers and editors of those five legacy media giants and put together a letter and which was done you know that's the background and that was therefore released it was appropriate that these people you know show some support for Julian as a publisher because in the case of the New York Times the publisher signed the letter not the journalist nor the editor the publisher and he realises that his prestige stature depends upon some sort of independence from government or perceived independence from government and then they'll pull his fingernails out if he doesn't do what the government requires prestige and stature and money protect him I'm sorry to say so in the case of Michael West review we were speaking just before the event started in the twitter files and the latest one was today published by Matt Taibi he demonstrates clearly that the FBI the CDC NIH National Institute of Health WHO CIA all of them including individual senators and congressman particular shift Adam Schiff who is the head of the intelligence committee of the congress had contact with twitter over removal of this and this that and the other in other words I can say conclusively to you that the first amendment no longer exists it's categorical in its statement that the government will make no laws interfering with the free press constraining conversation also free assembly and also religion it's categorical but no longer exists the government, FBI all of those institutions of state, CDC NIH CIA all of them constrain the conversation on twitter for one reason or another the first amendment is one of ten that constitute the bill of rights one of the I forget which one says that you need a trial with your peers you have to face your accusers Anwar Aliki an American citizen was drawn to death in Yemen his son 14 another American citizen was drawn to death so the the great glory of the American constitution no longer exists as a constraint upon government action it's pretty fierce it no longer exists as a constraint upon government action we just spent I think we went to 46 cities in the United States touring with Ithaca and the Q&As after really interesting because the people of the United States born as babies breathe in and out the first amendment it is imbued in their cultural understanding that they have this phenomenal golden element in their constitution it's gone the bill of rights they still believe in the bill of rights other commentators say that the American populace is insouciant careless but take upon yourself the full horror unable to trust your government in anything it does it'll just act in its own perceived interest power plays Bismarck called them you see them in the destruction of nation after nation after nation the horror of it 38 million refugees in the Middle East in 20 years refugee what is a refugee it's a mom and a dad and family looking for some safety after their community has been blown to bits Gideon Polja a researcher professor in Melbourne I think Melbourne University Gideon he researches excess death you know that medical people used to see if there's a pandemic and what it's effect and so on it's fully explored as a technique and fully understood estimates in 21 years 6 million souls have perished in the United States attack on Iraq Libya Libya that's sake Libya shown on TV the death of I've got a blank on his name now because it's upsetting Gaddafi his death was from a bayonet shoved up his anus as they dragged him along her reply is a paraphrase of Julius Caesar in Shakespeare as you remember the senate complained that his reports are too long so he said well why came I saw her conquered that person Hillary Clinton staggering isn't it she laughed we saw we came he died you know it's really important these things Julian Assange is emblematic an emblem of the collapse of the glories of the late 20th century it took 10,000 years for an understanding and a catastrophe of death of 60 million 80 million people in the Second World War and the destruction of country after country after country atom bombs dropped I mean the full horror of it all we understood that something would have to be done and so the people of the world emanated the desire for a united nations wherein states would relate to each other through a body of laws and pursue their interests within the constraints and overseen by the United Nations Security Council gone rubbish trashed United Nations repertoire on torture Professor Nils Melza made a report 2019 mid 2019 that Julian Assange was a victim of torture he went to the jail with two doctors who understand these things and they wrote their report and sent it to the United Kingdom Kingdom Government and the Swedish Government which they both ignored it derided it actually the United Kingdom Government I understand didn't even reply the Swedish Government replied the United Nations working group on arbitrary detention they investigated to whether Julian was being arbitrarily detained came to the conclusion that he was and published in February 2018 the detail of a comprehensive determination that Julian was arbitrarily detained and should be allowed free and paid compensation by Sweden and the United Kingdom derided derision due process that holds us together so we in this system have it that the defence must be as equally armed as the prosecution so that we can make a fair judgement on what's before us Julian Assange Lord Phillips 2011 in the extradition case brought b