Julie Bishop has corrected the parliamentary record a week after the government falsely claimed that it had provided correspondence from the Sydney siege gunman to a joint federal-state review.
The foreign affairs minister made the assertion several times during question time last week, when the opposition asked about revelations Man Haron Monis had written to the attorney general, George Brandis, about a desire to contact Islamic State (Isis) two months before the deadly attack.
In a media release last Thursday, Brandis said: “The letter, and my department’s reply, were both placed before the inquiry into the Martin Place siege conducted by the secretaries of the prime minister’s and NSW premier’s departments. Their report did not have any criticism of the way with which the Monis letter was dealt.”
Bishop, who represents Brandis in the lower house, repeated the claim that the letters were “placed before the inquiry” in her answers to parliament the same day.
But the foreign affairs minister has since told parliament that the Attorney General’s Department had advised “that the letter and reply were not provided to the review due to an administrative error in the Attorney General’s Department”.
Labor demanded to know why it took the government seven days to correct the record, saying Brandis had “sat in Senate estimates all week in the full knowledge that his statement was wrong”.
Brandis issued a statement saying the department had informed his office on Monday that the advice appeared to have been wrong, which prompted him to order his department’s secretary, Chris Moraitis, to conduct “an urgent inquiry within the department to establish the facts”.
Brandis said his office received Moraitis’s report “early this afternoon” and Bishop was advised “shortly before question time”.
Bishop, who has been overseas for discussions about the war against Isis, was back in the chamber for question time on Thursday and rose to the dispatch box afterwards to admit the error.
She said her statement had been based on the evidence given by the deputy secretary of the Attorney General’s Department, Katherine Jones, in a budget estimates session on 27 May.
Jones told the committee hearing that she had been seconded to the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet as part of the joint review and the letter “was provided to the review and we considered all the correspondence that was provided to us”.
Bishop said Jones had since written to the legal and constitutional affairs committee to correct her evidence. Bishop said although the letter had not been provided to the joint federal-state review, it was given to a separate inquiry, the New South Wales coronial inquest, which is currently under way.
“When advised of the error, the attorney general asked the secretary of his department, Mr Chris Moraitis, to conduct a comprehensive review into the matter to enable Ms Jones and ministers who were relying on her evidence to correct the record,” Bishop said.
“I should also reiterate that the director general of Asio, Mr Duncan Lewis, provided evidence to Senate estimates on Thursday 28 May 2015 that the handling of the letter by the attorney general’s office and the subsequent reply ... was appropriate.”
The manager of opposition business, Tony Burke, acknowledged Bishop had been away from parliament for most of the week, but said she should not have waited until after the last question time of the sitting fortnight to admit the error.
“We need to know when the attorney general found out that this information was wrong, when the prime minister [Tony Abbott] found out that this information was wrong and when the foreign minister found out that this information was wrong, because I have no doubt it was well in advance of when the foreign minister decided to confess to the parliament once question time had finished,” Burke said.
“The attorney general has become a turnstile of incompetence in this government.”
Abbott played down the four-day delay in correcting the record after Brandis was informed of the error. The prime minister said the detailed investigation into the circumstances concluded on Thursday and Bishop had “made an entirely appropriate disclosure to the parliament”.
Brandis said when he received Moraitis’s report on Thursday afternoon he “immediately wrote to the secretary of the Senate legal and constitutional affairs committee correcting my evidence of 28 May, which had been based on the department’s earlier advice”.
“That letter ... was delivered by hand at approximately 3.15pm,” he said.
The shadow attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, said the opposition was “entitled to ask legitimate questions about whether internal government processes for dealing with such red flag warnings are now in place given the current high security alert”.
“So far, the Coalition has provided no adequate explanation about why this letter was not referred to law enforcement agencies,” he said. “To make matters worse it misled the Australian people about this matter of national security.”
Dreyfus led the parliamentary questioning about the handling of the letter last week but at the time was accused by Bishop of “utterly contemptible” attempts to “make political mileage out of a national tragedy”.
The political dispute related to a letter Monis wrote to Brandis on 7 October 2014, disclosing his intention to contact “Caliph Ibrahim” – referring to the head of Isis in a way that appeared to recognise his status as leader of the self-declared caliphate.
“I would like to send a letter to Caliph Ibrahim, the leader of the Islamic State, in which making some comments and asking some questions,” Monis wrote under the letterhead of Sheikh Haron. “Please advise me whether the communication is legal or illegal.”
An official in the Attorney General’s Department responded on Brandis’s behalf on 5 November, pointing out that Isis was listed as a terrorist organisation but that the department could not provide specific legal advice. Monis was responsible for the Lindt cafe siege in Martin Place the following month.
Brandis maintained the letter had not been brought to his attention at the time and was handled “in accordance with long-established Attorney-General’s Department procedures” which did not identify anything in the letter as raising concerns.
Bishop and Brandis said the secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Michael Thawley, had written to the prime minister on Thursday to say that the letters would have made no difference to the outcome of the review.
Thawley said the attorney general’s department “advises that, through an administrative handling error, there was a group of five documents which they failed to hand over to the review team during the document discovery phase”.
The review team had obtained four of the five documents from other sources but the fifth document - the Monis letter - was not available at the time, he said.
The letters came to light as part of the coronial inquest into the deaths of Sydney siege hostages Katrina Dawson and Tori Johnson and gunman Monis on 16 December. Monis held staff and customers hostage inside the Lindt Cafe for about 17 hours.
