Labor will use the resumption of parliament to force a determination on whether leaked material from the NBN Co seized in controversial police raids during the federal election campaign attracts privilege.
The documents seized during the late night raids have been sealed in the parliament since the resolution of a legal wrangle with the AFP during the campaign – and Labor will now move to refer the case to the parliament’s powerful privileges committee for resolution.
The Melbourne parliamentary office of Labor’s deputy Senate leader, Stephen Conroy, and a house in Brunswick, were raided by the Australian federal police in the second week of the election campaign.
The raids followed a number of damaging leaks from the NBN Co that had called into question the management of the project when Malcolm Turnbull was the communications minister.
Both the raids themselves, and their timing, infuriated Labor, and prompted Conroy to write to the AFP commissioner, Andrew Colvin, formally asserting a claim of privilege.
Labor lodged a complaint with the AFP after the raids alleging a member of staff from the NBN Co, present on the night, took and circulated pictures of documents obtained during the operation which could have included Labor’s then confidential broadband policy for the election.
Following that complaint an interim agreement was reached that all the material taken during the operation was covered by parliamentary privilege and would be sealed and stored by the clerk of the Senate.
Conroy on Friday told Guardian Australia he had now sought advice from the clerk about how to proceed. “We will be pursuing these matters at the earliest opportunity,” he said. “We will be seeking a referral to the privileges committee.”
Labor had the option of pursuing the privileges claim through the courts, but pushing the issue back into the parliamentary arena will not only revive the political controversy over the management of the NBN project – it will trigger a vote on whether material supplied to politicians by whistleblowers in the course of parliamentary business should attract privilege or not.
During the campaign, Nick Xenophon, who now has a Senate bloc of three, signalled willingness to support Conroy in the referral to privileges and he indicated he would urge the Coalition to vote for the referral.
Xenophon said the issue of whether whistleblowers could come to Senators with confidential material was a significant one for all parliamentarians, and consequently, this was an issue bigger than partisan politics.
