Foreign interference bill tightened

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Via Domainfax:

In a significant acknowledgement of flaws in the original bill, [Attorney General] Porter said he was fixing the areas around secrecy and espionage that might unintentionally have put journalists at risk of committing offences when dealing with sensitive leaked material.

“There has been no intention to unnecessarily restrict appropriate freedoms of the media,” he said. “Where drafting improvements are identified that strike a better balance, the government will promote those changes.”

Most significantly, the changes mean recipients of a leak such as journalists will no longer be treated with the same severity as government employees doing the leaking – an aspect of the original bill that came in for particular criticism.

Charities are still caught in the net so Labor is unlikely to support it yet. GetUp must be saved.

More changes ahead.

About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.