No other topic of recent debate in Australia
sends people hurrying into their corners faster
than debate about free speech. This complex
and crucial topic has been appropriated by
conservative culture warriors to promote unrestrained
racism to the degree that it is in danger
of losing all greater meaning. Tonight, I
want to reclaim some of that space, and maybe
even build some bridges, by talking about
real threats to speech in Australia in 2017.
I want to start with some context.
There are countries around the world where
the act of journalism itself can be, in the
eyes of the authorities, sufficient justification
for imprisonment. There are countries around
the world that have state intelligence apparatus
so opaque and far-reaching that a journalist
may not even know that they have transgressed.
The first clue could come at the moment of
their arrest, and not sooner. Even if they
were able to determine the cause for their
arrest, they would not be able to share it,
not even with the publication that they work
for or with their family or their lawyer.
There are countries where federal law enforcement
can be deployed to pursue not the perpetrators
of gross mismanagement of public funds or
corruption but the person who blew the whistle.
There are countries where federal law enforcement
can monitor a journalist's call records with
no oversight and identify a confidential source
in order to then monitor them some more. There
are countries where a journalist working internationally
can publish explosive, important, world-shifting
public-interest revelations only to find that
their government all but abandons them as
they are hunted by the powers implicated in
their stories and then pursued in secret.
There are countries that record every movement
of their citizens and make that information
available to law enforcement and a range of
agencies without a warrant. There are countries
where governments at all levels are massively
escalating and consolidating the collection
of biometric data—facial-recognition material,
DNA, fingerprints and photographs—on all
of their citizens, including those never suspected
of a crime. There are countries where a single
media entity can overwhelmingly dominate the
landscape in most cities and freely use that
commercial dominance as a political weapon—and,
yes, that country is us in 2017: Australia.
The measure of the strength of our public
discourse and, in fact, our democracy itself
must be how well the powerful can be held
to account by even the most marginalised.
Instead, debate around speech has centred
on which words the wealthiest and the whitest
can use in their war of words against people
who do not get a right of reply in tabloid
newspapers or on talkback radio, and real,
substantive discussion about a strong, independent,
diverse and free press is long overdue in
Australia. Maybe it took those who have bravely
stood up for their industrial rights, including
those right here in the bureau two storeys
up from where we are standing tonight: those
journalists from Fairfax Media, who have even
had to sit out the budget—this week of all
weeks! If it takes industrial action of that
measure and that integrity to provoke this
discussion, then so be it.
When WikiLeaks, led by Australian publisher
and journalist Julian Assange, first published
the collateral murder video, it was not hailed
as a vital blow for freedom of expression
and accountability by the self-proclaimed
free speech advocates in conservative parties
or the think tanks and the publications—and
Reuters journalists were murdered in that
war crime, amongst a number of innocent Iraqi
civilians. But, instead, Mr Assange and his
colleagues were labelled as traitors, and
the Australian government distanced themselves
from him as rapidly as they could. In the
10 years since the attack in that video took
place, the capacity of media organisations
and citizen journalists to serve their fourth
estate function has been eroded—I would
argue, deliberately—by successive Australian
federal governments.
Among other things, the internet has relentlessly
consumed old business models and has left
many organisations struggling for their existence.
How do we ensure the survival of public interest
journalism and how do we keep as many voices
as possible in our media landscape? How do
we prevent state interference in acts of journalism?
I would have thought these are the free speech
debates that we needed to be having.
At the start of this year, as has been so
for many years, the most visited news sites
in the country were those belonging to the
major media groups—news.com.au, nine.com.au,
the ABC, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age.
This success obviously has not translated
to sustainability for some publishers in the
internet age. Nevertheless, the same incumbent
voices have carried their incumbency into
the digital age and they dominate online as
they do in older media. The same people are
holding the same power; the same people are
pushing the same agendas; the same columnists
and professional 'opinion-havers' are waging
the same boring cultural war.
After Mr Edward Snowden brought the world's
attention to covert surveillance by intelligence
agencies on an incredible scale—fine-grained,
real-time surveillance into every aspect of
our lives—every other nation in the Five
Eyes alliance had lively public debates, including
the US and the UK. They did not always go
in the direction that the Australian Greens
would have liked, but the debates happened.
In the United States, for example, they have
a powerful rights-based discourse that dates
back to the founding of their republic. That
debate simply failed to happen here in Australia.
Instead of seizing that opportunity for considered
discussion, Australia's then relatively freshly-minted
Attorney-General disregarded those revelations
entirely and dismissed the whistleblower Ed
Snowden as a 'traitor'—that was the word
he used.
With each new expansion of powers for law
enforcement and spy agencies under the guise
of national security—justified by the ever-malleable
war on terror—the coalition has retreated
further and further from any fidelity to the
principle of free expression, confident in
the knowledge that the speech that they were
most curtailing was criticism directed at
them. The Australian Labor Party sadly capitulated
to this argument, over and over again, deliberately
scrambling to avoid any suggestion that they
were weak on national security, no matter
how facile the attack on their integrity.
After a campaign that should have reached
a very different conclusion, Labor signed
on and voted for the Liberal government's
expensive and ineffective data retention scheme.
The signal stayed the same, and the noise
exponentially increased.
Mandatory data retention is a perfectly abhorrent
mix of intrusion and ineffectiveness. The
implementation has been a comedy of errors,
a debacle, behind the scenes and in public.
In just a few minutes, an individual with
basic technological literacy can circumvent
that scheme—as helpfully described by Prime
Minister Malcolm Turnbull on Sky TV. The concessions
in the bill, as ineffective and narrow as
they were, to protect journalists have been
proven ultimately worthless by the AFP's recent
announcement that their own officers broke
the law—their law—for which they have
received no disciplinary action and obviously
no charges. They were spying on an Australian
journalist without having obtained a warrant.
The response yielded a press conference and
a shrug of the shoulders, and they moved on.
Once again, the free speech champions in the
coalition stayed silent. To the coalition
spokespeople who are in here tonight: feel
free to interject if any amongst your number
raised a finger in protest at that outrage.
The government's only response, I understand,
freshly enough, was an announcement of more
than $300 million in new funding for the Australian
Federal Police. It feels somewhat as though
Australian journalists and their colleagues
overseas, who also put up with extraordinary
risks, including to their lives, are caught
between the hammer and the anvil—the hammer
of an indifferent business model where, even
now, we are seeing that the proud mastheads
of Fairfax may simply be subject to asset
stripping by an offshore conglomerate that
has absolutely no interest in the role of
public interest journalism; and, on the other
hand, the deprivations of law enforcement
and an indifferent government that is seeking
merely to manage the message and to manage
it out of existence, if necessary. Who would
be a journalist in 2017?
On behalf of the Australian Greens, I want
to convey my respect to the Fairfax staff
who have taken unprotected industrial action
this week and last week not just in defence
of their own employment—because, clearly,
it is their employment that is at stake—but
also in defence of all of us. We may not like
what they write about us down here on the
floor of the Senate, but that is just too
bad. We may want to see them better supported
and we may want to see more diverse voices
in the media landscape but, in the here and
now, they are the ones who are on the frontline,
and we support them. We hope that they can
reach some kind of conclusion with management,
who are taking home multimillion dollar pay
cheques to asset strip this proud entity in
the Australian media landscape.
At the same time as this is occurring, public
broadcasting is under unprecedented threat.
I have not yet been into the budget papers
in detail to see whether community broadcasters
got a break or whether they will shortly be
going to the wall as well. But from ABC to
SBS to community broadcasters to the old commercial
broadcasters and print businesses, independent,
free, fair, public interest journalism is
under attack from all sides. There are things
that we can do about it, and the Australian
Greens are up for that debate. We will work
with anybody in this chamber on providing
support, if it is appropriate, for new business
models to hold us in here to account because,
ultimately, that is what keeps all of us and
this country in good shape.
