Best of 2025 - When truth can no longer be silenced |
In Australia, secretive and remote institutions armed with increasingly restrictive laws are seriously eroding civic freedoms.
A repost from 7 November 2025
This ongoing trend dates back to the anti-terrorist hysteria that swept the country in the aftermath of the 11 September attacks, with some 50 pieces of anti-terror legislation rushed through Parliament with minimal public consultation.
Many of them contained measures, including control orders, supposedly aimed at combatting an extreme threat to national security. In next to no time, they were applied to new contexts at state and even federal level in ways that flagrantly breached established notions of criminal justice.
In recent years, the trend has continued unabated. Whistle-blowers have been routinely prosecuted or otherwise punished. The victims are well known.
In 2018, lawyer Bernard Collaery was charged with allegedly helping his client, an ex-spy known as Witness K, to unlawfully disclose information about an Australian secret intelligence mission. The revelation was damning.
Australia had bugged the Timor Leste government offices to gain advantage in negotiations over oil and gas reserves in the Timor Sea. The government of a wealthy country was trying to exploit its long-suffering neighbour, one of the poorest countries in the world. And here was Collaery, a man of the highest integrity, having to endure a prolonged and painful court process, and a government steadfastly refusing to acknowledge the enormity of its malpractice.
The Collaery saga is no isolated case. Former military lawyer David McBride was charged with disclosing classified materials to journalists. These materials were then used by the ABC to produce the Afghan files which brought to light credible evidence of war crimes committed by Australia’s special forces in Afghanistan. McBride was subsequently convicted........