Extract from ABC The Drum
Updated
The AFP's decision to raid a Labor office
in the middle of an election campaign may be pure coincidence. But
there's enough about this story to feed a narrative that it was more
about politics than law enforcement, writes Michael Bradley.
In case you slept in: the Australian Federal Police raided the office of senior Labor senator Stephen Conroy last night,
searching for material relating to the serial leaking of confidential
information from inside the National Broadband Network Corporation.When the Turnbull ministry spends all morning telling everyone very loudly in a lot of detail how much they don't know about this event, you get more than a faint whiff of something smelly.
The Government wants us to know two things: (a) the AFP operates entirely independently of the Government and makes its own operational decisions; and (b) THE AFP RAIDED A LABOR PARTY OFFICE LAST NIGHT but we had nothing to do with it. Message received, thank you.
The truth? Who knows. The AFP is supposed to be immune from political influence and uncaring about the timing or public perception of its actions. It is completely unprecedented for the offices of a major political party to be raided by the police during an election campaign, and the raid relates to an investigation that apparently has been ongoing since December 2015, so that's a little passing strange.
Interestingly, this particular raid wasn't entirely just an AFP operation. It's been reported they took along with them an employee of NBN Co. That's not unusual, as the AFP is often brought in to execute search warrants on behalf of Commonwealth agencies who don't have their own guns (such as the Tax Office).
It does, however, mean that the NBN hierarchy must have been aware of, and consulted about, the investigation and raid. Given how politicised the NBN process has been, and the very obvious significance of raiding the ALP, it is reasonable to be sceptical of any suggestion that the minister in charge of the NBN wasn't consulted before this happened.
The relevant Minister is Mitch Fifield. The previous minister, until he became Prime Minister, was Malcolm Turnbull.
Which brings us to the other aspect to this story that might excuse us for thinking that this has a lot more to do with politics than law enforcement. The NBN rollout has been a political hot potato ever since Turnbull, as opposition communications spokesman, targeted it as a massive Rudd white elephant and swore that he could deliver something just as good, way faster and way cheaper.
Once the Coalition took office, Turnbull got hold of the NBN and made sure it was front page news as he set about delivering his improved model - which he said would cost $29.5 billion instead of Labor's $44.9 billion project.
As the Government has consistently chosen to give us nothing other than PR spin on this project, the media has stepped into the breach and told us some of what the Government won't.
The leaking from inside the NBN has been a steady flow, and all major media outlets have published very detailed internal documents which suggest that all is anything but good with the rollout. The detail is as boring as you'd expect, but basically what it adds up to is that Turnbull's election promise of "Fast. Affordable. Sooner." will be wrong on every count. The cost is spiralling out of control and the rollout is massively behind schedule.
Actually the easiest way for the public to tell when a government program is in trouble is from how much it isn't hearing about it. On the NBN, the only real news has come from the leaks. Not that we should think it would have been any better if the ALP was still in power; both major parties have impressive track records of totally stuffing up major infrastructure projects.
The political problem here is that the unfolding NBN non-success hits the Prime Minister right where it hurts the most: his reputation as a wildly successful, clever and tech-savvy businessman. He has positioned himself as our Innovator-in-Chief; the perfect antidote to Rudd's showboating, Gillard's supposed untrustworthiness and Abbott's anti-science weirdness. He understands the uncertain future and he is the man to lead us into it.
In this context, the constant leaking of revelations which suggest that the NBN was a massive fail under his watch is potentially devastating, given on how many other fronts Turnbull has already surrendered his natural advantages.
On top of this, what we're talking about here is not national security, defence secrets or diplomatic embarrassment. NBN is a company, not a government department. The AFP has jurisdiction because the material which has been leaked is Commonwealth property, but not of a kind which can do much damage other than embarrassing the Government itself. NBN Co is a monopoly provider; it's not under any competitive or commercial threat; it holds no trade secrets.
All of these features, along with the presence of the media at the raid, feed the narrative of suspicion that the AFP may have been co-opted in an exercise that has a lot more to do with politics than law enforcement. If not that, then it is legitimate to ask why the limited resources of the AFP have been directed towards activities that could equally be described as a crime or as whistleblowing depending on your perspective.
Are we entitled to know what's going on with the NBN? It's spending, we think, more than $50 billion of our money on infrastructure for our benefit. If it's screwing that up and wasting our money, is it not reasonable that we should be told?
As the Government has consistently chosen to give us nothing other than PR spin on this project, the media has stepped into the breach and told us some of what the Government won't. That, in a functioning democracy, is a critical media role.
By all means, leaks of information relating to national security should be investigated and prosecuted. The NBN context does not engage the bigger WikiLeaks-style debate about balancing security against freedom. There's nothing to see here except embarrassing revelations about a project that has proved to be much harder than either party promised.
The AFP's choice to raid the Opposition party's headquarters in the middle of an election campaign may have been pure coincidence. The context gives us every right to doubt that, and to question why everyone's so desperate to prevent us from finding out what exactly the story is with the NBN.
Michael Bradley is the managing partner of Sydney law firm Marque Lawyers, and he writes a weekly column for The Drum. He tweets at @marquelawyers.
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