• Staff writers
• The Courier-Mail
• February 20, 2014 12:00AM
THE Australian Federal Police are the nation’s first line of defence and investigation for major crime that can often cross international borders.
The AFP is a well-funded, $1.3 billion a year force tasked with combating everything from terrorism to money laundering, people trafficking, drug smuggling, serious fraud and cybercrime. It is far from some provincial Keystone Cops outfit, and maintains a sophisticated global network that co-ordinates with other law enforcement agencies to fight organised crime and security threats across the world.
If Australia is facing a terror alert it is the AFP and other frontline national security agencies such as ASIO that are tasked with uncovering and neutralising any plot.
Given this brief, the heavy-handed raids this week on media outlets that have reportedly agreed to pay convicted Bali drug smuggler Schapelle Corby for her story simply beggar belief.
Armed police executed search warrants on the headquarters of Channel 7 in Sydney and other associated premises including the offices of New Idea, a subsidiary of Seven West Media offshoot Pacific Magazines. Reports put the number of AFP officers involved in the raids at up to 40 – all charged with looking for evidence of a deal the Corby family reportedly signed on behalf of Schapelle for her first post-prison interview with Seven’s current affairs flagship program, Sunday Night.
Australian Federal Police officers raid the Channel 7 office at Eveleigh in Sydney in relation to a Schapelle Corby interview.
The AFP defended the raids as being an operation in relation to the Proceeds of Crime Act, which provides for the restraint and forfeiture of the proceeds of crime against Australian law.
“This includes,” the AFP argued in a brief statement, “provisions for literary proceeds, where a person profits from their criminal notoriety.
“Literary proceeds action does not prevent a person from telling his or her story to the media. The provisions do not interfere with freedom of speech.”
That is a moot point when dozens of law enforcement officers descend on the offices of a media organisation and start scouring both corporate and news records in what appears to be a fishing expedition of hugely expensive and intimidating proportions. The apparent churlish and aggressive nature of the raids resulted in the staff of one of this country’s main news-gathering organisations being warned quite bluntly that filming the event may amount to some form of “hindrance”.
As Seven Network chief Tim Warner says, this is “quite possibly unprecedented for a media organisation”.
Regardless of any precedent, and indeed the implicit threat to a free and independent media in this country, mass raids more suited to rooting out a major threat to national security must surely have most reasonable Australians asking whether this overkill is not a flagrant waste of resources.
If there is a legal issue with any payments made to the Corby family – a fact disputed by Seven – then so be it, and let justice take its course. Surely, though, such matters can be resolved without dozens of our country’s premier police tied up rummaging through files relating to a very current (and non-security threatening) news story?
Is it any wonder that state jurisdictions such as Queensland have had to resort to extraordinary legislative measures to combat the threat of criminal bikie gangs, when our leading organised crime-fighting body seems more interested in throwing resources at discovering whether a media interview with a woman let out of prison in a country 5000km away might have been paid for?
For ordinary Australians worried about the access our children have to drugs on our streets or the seeds of corruption that may exist in some major institutions, this week’s blitzkrieg by the AFP smacks of misdirected excess and waste.
It is more indicative of an organisation with skewed priorities that should be focusing its time and manpower on the big threats, not the reported circumstances of a media interview with a small-time drug smuggler living in another country.
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