The Coalition has agreed to allow parliament’s powerful privileges committee to determine whether material obtained by the Australian federal police in controversial raids during and after the election campaign will be protected by privilege.
The government had looked to be positioning to avoid that outcome but in one of the first gestures of the new Senate, the leader of the government, George Brandis, said he would support the reference to privileges because it was the “appropriate course of action.”
The action in the Senate has been triggered by raids following an embarrassing leak of confidential information from NBN Co. Labor says the leak revealed cost blow outs and delays in the NBN rollout under Malcolm Turnbull, the former communications minister.
Police raided the office of Labor’s deputy Senate leader, Stephen Conroy, and the home of a Labor staffer, Andy Byrne, during the first week of the election campaign, in search of the confidential material, which surfaced during parliamentary committees of inquiry, and was published by some news outlets.
Police then came to Parliament House last week for a second raid. During the second raid, which involved AFP officers accessing the parliamentary server, the AFP invoked national security grounds to prevent opposition staff from recording the investigation that stretched into the night last Wednesday.
The activity perturbed parliamentarians across party lines, given the precedents being set. Ahead of Tuesday night’s deliberations in the Senate, the Liberal senator Cory Bernardi signalled he could side with Labor in sending the matter off to the privileges committee.
Conroy invoked privilege during the first police raid, which means all the material taken by the AFP in relation to the NBN Co leaks has been locked in the safe of the clerk of the Senate until the chamber makes a determination about how to proceed.
The Coalition’s decision to back Labor’s motion referring the case to privileges followed an offer by the Senate president, Stephen Parry, to broker talks between Brandis and the Labor Senate leader, Penny Wong, to determine a way forward.
Parry later withdrew the offer after it became clear the Coalition would back the motion.
Speaking to the motion, Conroy told the Senate all parliamentarians needed to stand up to defend their work with whistleblowers rather than serve short-term partisan interests, and he said journalists also needed to defend their professional imperative to publish material in the public interest.
“What is at stake here is not simply a question of the prime minister’s legacy as communications minister, much as that legacy deserves close scrutiny,” Conroy said Tuesday night. “What this is about is the proper functioning of the parliament and our democratic system.”
“It is, at its core, about the constitutional right of the people of Australia, through their parliament, to hold the executive to account without fear or recrimination.”
“There must be no place for politics when it comes to such fundamental democratic principles.”
In accepting the referral Brandis told the chamber there were competing interests to balance and it would now be up to the privileges committee to determine how to proceed.
“The issue raises not one, but two important principles. Senator Conroy has rightly said it raises the matter of privilege of the Senate. It is not the privilege of individual senators, it is the privilege of the Senate, as Senator Conroy has rightly said,” Brandis said.
He noted that interest was set in tension with another principle. “That is the due and proper administration of the criminal justice system by those officers charged with its administration, in this case officers of the AFP.”
