Tony Abbott’s office was notified that the Attorney General’s Department was “ducking for cover” three days before the government corrected the record over its handling of a letter from the Sydney siege gunman Man Haron Monis.
Another email presented to the Senate inquiry into the matter reinforces previously tendered evidence that the prime minister’s office was aware of the error on Monday 1 June – but parliament was not told until Thursday 4 June.
The evidence relates to a letter the siege gunman wrote to the attorney general, George Brandis, in October, two months before the deadly attack in the Lindt cafe, to ask whether it was legal to contact the leader of Islamic State.
Brandis and the foreign affairs minister, Julie Bishop, said on 28 May that Monis’s letter had been given to the joint review conducted jointly by senior bureaucrats from the federal and New South Wales governments. They were relying on comments made a day earlier by Katherine Jones, the deputy secretary of the Attorney General’s Department (AGD).
A newly released email shows the deputy secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Allan McKinnon, wrote to the prime minister’s office at 11.50am on 1 June. He told the unnamed recipients: “I have rung and spoken to AGD again. They are ducking for cover. But I have prepared the attached. It is as much as I or anyone knows.”
The attachment was a briefing note that stated definitively that “AGD never provided the Monis/Brandis letter to the Martin Place review team” and “the team was never aware of the existence of the letter”.
The note said AGD located the letter on 2 February and called a junior member of the review team about about sending it across but “were told that the review had already been completed”.
“AGD is now reviewing the history of the events to determine why the letter was not found when AGD were asked to provide all relevant material, when they found the letter, why they did not communicate the fact of the letter’s existence to senior officers working on the report,” concluded the briefing note.
But at 12.15pm – 25 minutes after the note was sent to the prime minister’s office – McKinnon said the same note to the AGD along with an email that reported: “PMO says that AG can answer any questions on this issue now that they know the review team didn’t receive it [the Monis letter]. PM won’t use the attached but you should be aware.”
The 12.15pm email to AGD was released last week – and highlighted in media reports on Friday – but the earlier email to the prime minister’s office is new.
Labor’s Senate leader, Penny Wong, said it was further evidence that the government had delayed the “so-called investigation” into the issue and waited until after question time on the last day of the sitting fortnight to avoid parliamentary scrutiny.
“Every day, we are seeing more and more evidence emerge that the prime minister’s private office was engaged in a deliberate cover up,” she said.
“It’s time for the prime minster to tell the truth about what happened here.”
Abbott has repeatedly defended the government’s handling of the issue.
“As soon as it became clear that there was a possible problem with the testimony of the officer from the Attorney General’s Department, a thorough review was undertaken by that department,” Abbott’s spokesman said on Friday.
“As soon as that review was completed, the record was corrected by the attorney general and by the foreign minister.”
Abbott’s spokesman pointed to comments by the Asio chief, Duncan Lewis, that the letter had been handled appropriately, and by the secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Michael Thawley, that the letter would not have affected the inquiry’s outcomes.
The new documents also show correspondence between Abbott’s office and the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet on Tuesday 2 June – two days before Thawley wrote to the prime minister to assure him the correspondence would have made no difference to the review’s findings.
At 1.51pm on 2 June, shortly before Question Time, McKinnon told unnamed recipients in the prime minister’s office that the Monis letter had now been passed to the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.
“It is like so many other Monis letters, a bit strange, attempting to be provocative and amongst the thousands of other pieces of information absolutely unremarkable.”
McKinnon further reported that Thawley had yet to see the letter “but I have discussed the letter with him and understands exactly what I mean by that description”.
At 2.02pm, a person in the prime minister’s office replied to McKinnon: “Thanks Allan. Can we discuss one further aspect after QT.”
The nature of this “further aspect” is unclear.
The documents have been presented to the Senate’s legal and constitutional affairs references committee, which is conducting an inquiry into the government’s handling of the issue.
Brandis has previously defended the government’s readiness to correct the record. He said he was advised on 1 June “that it appeared” that the AGD’s advice about the correspondence was wrong but he waited for the results of a review by his top bureaucrat, Chris Moraitis, to “establish the facts”.
Brandis’s office received the resulting report by email at 1.09pm on 4 June. Brandis and Bishop corrected the record later that afternoon. Brandis informed the Senate estimates committee to which the incorrect evidence was originally given, and Bishop told the lower house at the end of Question Time.
