Court orders public hearing on $50 billion spy scandal
A tribunal has rejected the government's request to keep proceedings behind closed doors, forcing officials to testify next month about the 2004 bugging of Timor-Leste.
By Ricardo Alvarez ·
The Australian government spent years maintaining that a 2004 spy operation was such a closely guarded secret that even discussing it in public would be dangerous. That argument ended on Friday when the administrative review tribunal ruled in favor of former senator Rex Patrick, forcing the Commonwealth to hold unclassified parts of an upcoming hearing in public.
The dispute centers on documents from 2004 that detail how Australian spies bugged Timor-Leste government offices to gain leverage in oil and gas negotiations. The target was the Greater Sunrise gasfields, which hold resources estimated to be worth more than $50 billion. The Australian government has long issued a Glomar response, refusing to confirm or deny that the bugging took place or that relevant documents exist.
The issue first surfaced in 2013 when a former Australian Secret Intelligence Service officer, known as Witness K, contacted lawyer Bernard Collaery. Collaery was acting for Timor-Leste in a dispute at The Hague. The pair attempted to use the espionage evidence to challenge the maritime boundary agreement. Collaery’s office was subsequently raided, and the case dragged on for years before being dropped in 2022.
Patrick’s current campaign began with a request for cabinet documents from 2004 held by the National Archives of Australia. The government argued that revealing the documents would undermine national security. On Friday, the tribunal’s deputy president, Peter Britten-Jones, disagreed. He wrote that the officials involved were highly qualified and experienced enough to handle the discussion without slipping up. He stated that the risk of an inadvertent disclosure of certificated material was negligible.
Government lawyers had argued that the stakes were very high. Deputy chief solicitor Justin Davidson told the court last Thursday that it would be nearly impossible to mitigate the risk of an intelligence official revealing sensitive information. He admitted he was not beyond making a mistake. The Commonwealth also proposed that the public be barred from open hearings but allowed to view a transcript after review by the foreign intelligence agency. That proposal was rejected.
The full hearing is scheduled for late November. Ewan McMillan, an Asis deputy director general, and Michelle Chan, a deputy secretary at the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, will offer their testimonies. Patrick, who has described the saga as a replay of an Austin Powers movie, said only the intelligence agencies and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade still think the operation is a secret. He noted that the taxpayer is paying for barristers and lawyers to argue the government's case.
In a 2019 affidavit, Timor-Leste president Jose Ramos-Horta stated that a full and open disclosure of what may or may not have occurred in 2004 would benefit the relationship between the two nations. The new maritime border was signed in 2018 after Timor-Leste withdrew its claims in The Hague in 2017 as a confidence-building measure.
