Senior bureaucrats have rejected claims the attorney general’s department (AGD) was “ducking for cover” after it discovered it had mishandled a letter from the Sydney siege gunman, but conceded the series of mistakes was astounding.
The secretary of the department, Chris Moraitis, came under pressure at a Senate hearing on Monday about a delay in correcting the parliamentary record about a letter Man Haron Monis sent to the attorney general, George Brandis, two months before the deadly December siege.
On 27 May the AGD’s deputy secretary, Katherine Jones, said the letter – asking whether it was legal to contact the Islamic State leader – had been provided to the review of the siege’s handling. The claim was repeated by Brandis and the foreign affairs minister, Julie Bishop, who pointed to the lack of any adverse findings in the review report to defend the government’s handling of Monis’s letter.
Internal emails show Tony Abbott’s office was made aware on Monday 1 June that the AGD had failed to send the letter to the joint federal and New South Wales government review into the siege – but parliament was not told about the error in the department’s previous testimony to a Senate inquiry until Thursday 4 June.
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 that the AGD was “ducking for cover” over the issue.
An attached briefing note stated definitively that “AGD never provided the Monis/Brandis letter to the Martin Place review team”, but noted that an AGD officer was aware of this fact as far back as 2 February.
Moraitis told Monday’s hearing in Canberra that he was surprised to learn on 1 June of the junior officer’s earlier discussions with the review team about the unsent Monis correspondence. A member of the review team replied that the report had already been completed, so it was too late to send the correspondence.
The AGD secretary said he had chosen not to correct the record on 1 June and instead requested an internal review of all the facts because he was concerned there could be further mistakes.
“I had real concerns about correcting the record accurately,” Moraitis told the Senate’s legal and constitutional affairs references committee, which is conducting an inquiry into the handling of the Monis letter.
“I was presented with a series of revelations, let us say, which pretty much left me astounded to be honest. The one thing I wanted was to ensure that any correction that was done was accurate … to ensure we made no more mistakes.
“That was another concern I had – that there’s this series of administrative errors, oversights, people not communicating up the line, checking material that frankly you couldn’t make up, and then making sure that if and when we do correct it was corrected properly and please, no more mistakes. That was the mindset in which I was approaching this.”
Moraitis said he was “mortified about what has happened” and rejected the “ducking for cover” description.
“It wasn’t my impression of what was going on in the department, to be honest with you,” he said.
“Were we running around looking for answers? Yes. Were we running around like headless chooks, if you might use that phrase, colloquialism? Perhaps. But ducking for cover is not the language I would have used.”
Labor has been highly critical of the government for waiting until the final day of a parliamentary sitting fortnight to retract the previous claims, saying it was to avoid scrutiny.
Labor senator Joe Ludwig said the AGD should have promptly retracted the false claim and indicated it was still investigating the facts.
Ludwig said the AGD opened itself up for criticism by waiting for the internal review to be completed before issuing any public correction.
“Ultimately then any subsequent correction of the record looks untidy, it looks delayed, and in this instance it looked like a cover-up,” he said.
Moraitis said he did not realise that he “could half-correct the record”.
Jones said she took “ultimate responsibility” for her original claim about the Monis letter and the timing of the correction. But she said she needed to know whether the Monis letter had been provided to the review team from another source.
“I didn’t say in my evidence AGD provided the letter; I said the letter had been provided to the review, so it was a slightly broader statement that needed to be corrected,” Jones said.
The Australian federal police (AFP) told the Senate inquiry they had not been made aware of the Monis correspondence before the siege occurred.
“Our understanding is the particular letter that is the focus of this inquiry was seized by the NSW police either on the days of the siege [15-16 December 2014] or shortly thereafter,” said Neil Gaughan, the AFP’s acting deputy commissioner.
“The AFP was not in receipt of the correspondence and wasn’t aware of its existence until 28 January [2015].”
NSW police notified the federal police of the existence of the correspondence on 28 January, which prompted the federal police to email the AGD the same day seeking copies of all such letters.
Abbott’s office has previously defended the government’s handling of the issue, saying a “thorough review” was launched “as soon as it became clear that there was a possible problem with the testimony”.
