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'Secret: The Making of Australia’s Security State'

By Warren Reed - posted Friday, 20 September 2019


Maybe you're wondering what's behind the current case of former Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) officer, Witness K (who led the team that bugged the cabinet office in Timor Leste), and his erstwhile lawyer Bernard Collaery, and why it's dragging on endlessly, to the abject dismay of ASIS men and women serving under cover overseas, many in dangerous environments.

In essence, Toohey's book is all about accountability, a surfeit of which Australia is hardly suffering from. The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse and the more recent banking royal commission have attested to that.

Accountability is crucial to any democracy's intelligence apparatus. Why, because it's most likely that if a democracy is suborned and ultimately dismantled it is most likely to start within that intelligence community, working in tandem with politicians. While the majority of men and women who work in our agencies are loyal and hard-working, it's those who go rogue that we need to worry about. That's why intelligence whistleblowers should be taken seriously.

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As Toohey points out, well-informed leaks about the phoney intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction might have prevented the 2003 invasion and its disastrous consequences. Cast your mind back to the famed Pentagon Papers that reported on how badly the Vietnam War was going. They were leaked by Daniel Ellsberg and first came to the attention of the public on the front page of The New York Times in 1971. The US Supreme Court refused to stop publication. As Toohey observes, this was a win for transparency that would be impossible under recent new laws in Australia that rule out the "public interest' defence used in the Pentagon Papers case. Nor does Australia have anything similar to the protection of free speech contained in the first amendment to the US Constitution.

Toohey writes that two Australian academic lawyers, Keiran Hardy and George Williams, in a forthcoming book, Free Speech and Counterterrorism in Australia, make a strong case that the "lack of formal protection for free speech and other human rights has allowed Australia's federal parliament to enact many laws in response to terrorism that would be unthinkable in other [democratic] countries."

Moreover, when things get sloppy we need to be concerned. On 16 November 2018, for example, the Inspector-General for Intelligence and Security, Margaret Stone, told the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security that she was "very concerned that the inspector-general's office doesn't appear in the legislation" it was expected to oversight. When things like that happen, we know we should not just be alert but also alarmed.

If you could freely wander around the engine rooms of our intelligence agencies and chat to the men and women who do the hard yards, there's one thing they'd tell you in their customary laconic way: Never forget that age-old saying, "Who guards the guardian?" Toohey's book explains why they'd say that.

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This is a review of SECRET: The Making of Australia’s Security State, by Brian Toohey, Melbourne University Press, September 2019.



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About the Author

Warren Reed was an Australia-Japan Business Cooperation Committee scholar in the Law Faculty of Tokyo University in the 1970s. He later spent ten years in intelligence and was also chief operating officer of the Committee for Economic Development of Australia. He served in Asia, the Middle East and India.

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