this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2024
18 points (95.0% liked)

Australia

3620 readers
212 users here now

A place to discuss Australia and important Australian issues.

Before you post:

If you're posting anything related to:

If you're posting Australian News (not opinion or discussion pieces) post it to Australian News

Rules

This community is run under the rules of aussie.zone. In addition to those rules:

Banner Photo

Congratulations to @[email protected] who had the most upvoted submission to our banner photo competition

Recommended and Related Communities

Be sure to check out and subscribe to our related communities on aussie.zone:

Plus other communities for sport and major cities.

https://aussie.zone/communities

Moderation

Since Kbin doesn't show Lemmy Moderators, I'll list them here. Also note that Kbin does not distinguish moderator comments.

Additionally, we have our instance admins: @[email protected] and @[email protected]

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
18
Labor shelves election promise for inquiry into prosecution of Witness K and Bernard Collaery (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by quitenormal to c/[email protected]
1 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I know it's a little old. Thought it was more relevant given the recent confected outage over Labor and election promises.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Labor has quietly shelved its pre-election promise to hold an inquiry into the controversial 2004 Timor-Leste bugging scandal and the former Coalition government’s pursuit of ex-spy Witness K and his lawyer, Bernard Collaery.

In August 2021, amid heavy criticism over the secrecy shrouding the cases of Collaery and Witness K, Labor promised to hold an inquiry if elected after it voted with the then Coalition government to block a crossbench push for one.

Collaery had been charged for his alleged role helping Witness K reveal an Australian espionage mission to spy on Timor-Leste during negotiations over oil and gas reserves in the Timor Sea in 2004.

Gallagher, at the time, said Labor would reject the former senator Rex Patrick’s motion to refer Australia’s involvement in the Timor-Leste bugging operation to an inquiry after determining the parliamentary joint committee on intelligence and security (PJCIS) was limited in its powers.

On Tuesday, the ACT court of appeal released the judgments relating to how much of the prosecution of Collaery could be conducted in public, more than two years after a landmark ruling lifted the veil on the lawyer’s trial.

The federal government fought against the full judgment’s release, after it was handed down in October 2021, arguing a number of redactions needed to be applied in the interests of national security.

The original article contains 588 words, the summary contains 219 words. Saved 63%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!