The contest for influence in the Pacific is no longer confined to diplomacy, aid projects or infrastructure.

Increasingly, it is being waged through information, media and communications networks.

A recent report, Understanding China’s Footprint in the Pacific Island Media Landscape, paints a picture of a region where newsrooms are under financial pressure, audiences are migrating online and foreign powers are competing to shape narratives.

• READ MORE: Understanding China’s Footprint in the Pacific Island Media Landscape
• Why Australia’s cuts to news services in the Indo‑Pacific are a failure of soft diplomacy
• Other Pacific media reports

The findings are drawn from a major study conducted by researchers from the Washington DC-based Centre for Naval Analyses (CNA), a United States non-profit organisation specialising in security, strategic and public policy issues.

The report examined media systems and China’s engagement across 15 Pacific Island countries and territories between 2024 and 2025 through fieldwork, interviews and consultations with media practitioners, academics and policymakers.

The report was launched during a virtual panel discussion on May 20, 2026, featuring presentations by CNA researchers Heidi Holz, Genevieve Collins, John Mahoney and Darlene Onuorah.

They were joined by regional academics Dr Shailendra Singh, associate professor and head of journalism at the University of the South Pacific, and Professor Stephen Noakes, head of politics and international relations at the University of Auckland.

Broader questions
While the report focuses on China’s growing media footprint, it also raises broader questions about the future of journalism, media independence and information sovereignty in Pacific Island countries.

For Fiji, the findings are particularly significant. As one of the region’s largest media markets and a diplomatic hub for the Pacific, Fiji has become a focal point for Chinese engagement through media partnerships, journalist exchanges and government-to-government cooperation.

The report also argues that media organisations across the Pacific are facing some of the most challenging operating conditions in decades.

Researchers found widespread concerns about declining newspaper circulation, shrinking advertising revenues and the growing dominance of social media platforms. One Pacific media practitioner described the situation as “the worst in history” for the region’s media industry, while another said many newsrooms had become a “revolving door” because journalists frequently leave for better-paying jobs.

The report warns that these financial pressures are creating vulnerabilities that external actors can exploit through media assistance, training programmes and content partnerships, making media sustainability not only an economic issue but increasingly a geopolitical one.

At the same time, researchers concluded that China’s overall influence remains limited compared with the longstanding reach and credibility of Australian and New Zealand media organisations.

The report has sparked wider discussion among Pacific media leaders about foreign aid, editorial independence and the long-term sustainability of journalism in the region.

Support for democracy
Dr Singh argues that aid to the media sector is often portrayed as support for democracy and media freedom, but is also shaped by geopolitics, donor interests and soft power.

“Even media aid comes with strings attached, regardless of who the donor is or what they claim,” he said.

According to Dr Singh, the Pacific’s media crisis is not new. The region continues to experience high levels of journalist attrition, while journalism schools that train future reporters receive little attention from major donor-funded media programmes.

He argues that much of the support provided to the media sector is driven by strategic interests rather than long-term capacity building.

Dr Singh’s assessment mirrors one of the CNA report’s central observations — that foreign interest in Pacific media is increasingly being shaped by strategic competition, particularly concerns over China’s growing influence in the region.

Fiji Media Association general secretary Stanley Simpson says the issue is less about who is offering support and more about whether that support responds to the needs of Pacific media organisations.

“Too much ‘let’s help ourselves and give more money to ourselves so we can help the Pacific’ and not enough ‘let’s work with Pacific media so they can help themselves and be our partner’,” he said.

Inconsistent support
Simpson was responding to an article by Australian journalism academic Professor Alexandra Wake of RMIT University, who argued that Australia risks weakening its soft-power influence through inconsistent support for international broadcasting and regional journalism initiatives.

Dr Wake contended that trusted news services remain critical to regional stability, particularly as misinformation spreads and other powers expand their influence.

However, Simpson says the issue is not simply the amount of funding available, but where it is directed.

“We are looking for real funding and support that makes a difference,” he said.

“Not one-sided funding which seems to help Australian organisations more than Fijians.”

He argues that Fiji media organisations have repeatedly sought practical assistance such as cameras, editing equipment, software and broadcast technology, but have often been offered training programmes instead.

His comments highlight a recurring theme in the debate over media aid in the Pacific. While Australia remains one of the region’s most trusted media partners through the ABC and programs such as PACMAS, there is continuing discussion over whether media assistance is sufficiently aligned with Pacific priorities.

Simply struggling
For all the discussion about foreign influence, many Pacific media organisations are simply struggling to survive.

The CNA report notes that declining revenues, digital disruption and staffing shortages have weakened media resilience throughout the region. These challenges were compounded by the covid-19 pandemic and continue to affect both commercial and public-interest journalism.

Dr Singh says this financial pressure helps explain why Pacific organisations increasingly engage with a range of development partners.

While Australia is understandably reluctant to create dependency, he argues that Pacific media systems operate in small markets where economies of scale do not exist and long-term support remains necessary.

To illustrate the situation, Dr Singh cited veteran Tongan publisher and Pacific Islands News Association president Kalafi Moala.

“When you are drowning, you will grab at any hand that is outstretched. You don’t care whether it is China, Australia or America.”

That sentiment may help explain why China’s media engagement efforts have attracted increasing attention.

Digital media
According to the CNA report, China has expanded media cooperation agreements, journalist exchanges, training programmes and diplomatic engagement throughout the Pacific. Fiji has featured prominently in these efforts, including agreements on digital media cooperation and journalist training.

At the same time, the report concludes that Chinese state media outlets still have relatively limited reach among Pacific audiences. Broadcasters such as Australia’s ABC and New Zealand’s RNZ remain among the most trusted international news providers in the region.

Trust, however, cannot be taken for granted.

Simpson argues that Pacific media organisations demonstrated resilience during Fiji’s years of political restrictions and economic hardship, often with limited international support.

“When we were being beaten, threatened and censored, and almost closing down due to political and economic pressure, where was Australian support for the Fiji media?” he asked.

The question challenges traditional development partners to consider whether support for Pacific media has always matched their stated commitment to democratic values and press freedom.

Broader geopolitical contest
As the CNA report makes clear, Pacific media organisations now find themselves at the centre of a broader geopolitical contest.

Foreign governments will continue to compete for influence and aid priorities will continue to be shaped by strategic interests. Yet for Pacific journalists confronting shrinking revenues, digital disruption and rising public expectations, the more pressing issue is sustainability.

The real challenge is not who provides support, but whether that support genuinely strengthens Pacific media organisations, protects editorial independence and helps ensure they remain accountable to the communities they serve.

Alifereti Sakiasi is a journalist with The Fiji Times. Based in Suva, he primarily contributes to The Sunday Times, where he covers a wide array of human interest, social, cultural, and sports events. This article is republished from The Fiji Times with permission.

There’s been skillful work in journalism’s dark arts on display in the UK this past week, as the nasty British right-wing media pack tore down two senior BBC executives. The right-wing culture warriors will be celebrating big time.

They reckon they’ve put a big dent in Britain’s most trusted and most used news media with the scalps of director-general Tim Davie and director of news Deborah Turness.

Best of all, the London Daily Telegraph was able to make it look like an inside job (leaning into a paean of outrage from a former part-time “standards” adviser), hiding its hit job behind the pretence of serious investigative journalism.

• READ MORE: Inside the year-long BBC saga that led to Trump’s $1bn lawsuit threat
• Other BBC reports

For the paper long dubbed the Torygraph, it’s just another day of pulling down the country’s centrist institutions for not being right wing enough in the destructive, highly politicised world of British news media.

Sure, there’s criticisms to be made of the BBC’s news output. There’s plenty of research and commentary that pins the broadcaster for leaning over backwards to amplify right-wing talking points over hot-button issues like immigration and crime. (ABC insiders here in Australia call it the preemptive buckle.)

Most recently, for example, a Cardiff University report last month found that nearly a quarter of BBC News programmes included Nigel Farage’s Reform Party — far more coverage than similar-sized parties like the centrist Liberal Democrats or the Greens received.

It’s why there are mixed views about Davie (who started in the marketing rather than the programme-making side of the business), while the generally respected Turness is being mourned and protested more widely.

BBC’s damage-control plan
The resignations flow from the corporation’s damage-control plan around an earlier — and more genuine — BBC scandal: the 2020 expose that then rising star Martin Bashir had forged documents to nab a mid-1990s Princess Diana interview. You know the one: the royal-rocking “there were three of us in the marriage” one.

The Boris Johnson government grabbed onto the scandal as an opportunity to drive “culture change”, as then Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden put it in an interview in Murdoch’s The Times. As part of that change, the BBC board (almost always the villain in BBC turmoil) decided to give the Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee a bit of a hand, by adding an external “adviser”.

Enter Michael Prescott, a former News Corp political reporter before moving on to PR and lobbying. Not a big BBC gig (it pays $30,000 a year), but it came with the fancy title of “Editorial Adviser”.

Roll forward four years: new government, new board, new BBC scandal. Prescott’s term ended last July. But he left a land-mine behind: a 19-page jeremiad, critiquing the BBC and its staff over three of the right’s touchstone issues: Trump, Gaza and trans people.

It fingered the BBC’s respected Arab programming for anti-Israel bias and smeared LGBTQIA+ reporters for promoting a pro-trans agenda.

Last week, his letter turned up (surprise!) — all over the Telegraph’s front pages, staying there every day since last Tuesday, amplified by its partner on the right, the Daily Mail, helped along with matching deplora-quotes from conservative leader Kemi Badenoch and demands for answers from the Tory MP who chairs the House of Commons Culture Standing Committee.

The one stumble sustaining the outrage? Back in November 2024, on the BBC’s flagship Panorama immediately before the US presidential election, snippets of Trump’s speech on the day of the January 6 riot had been spliced together, bringing together words which had been spoken 50 minutes apart.

Not for the first time, heads have rolled at the BBC following a puffed-up scandal pushed by the UK’s Tory press. Will the ABC learn the lessons of its British compatriot? https://t.co/nteARbd2M3

— Crikey (@crikey_news) November 11, 2025

Carelessness . . . or bias?
Loose editing? Carelessness? Or (as the cacophony on the right insist) demonstrable anti-Trump bias?

The real problem? The loose editing took the report over one of the right’s red lines: suggesting — however lightly — that Trump was in any way responsible for what happened at the US Capital that day.

Feeding the right’s fury, last Thursday the BBC released its findings that a newsreader’s facial expression when she changed a script on-air from “pregnant people” to “pregnant women” laid the BBC “open to the interpretation that it indicated a particular viewpoint in the controversies currently surrounding trans identity”.

Even as the British news media has deteriorated into the destructive, mean-spirited beast that it has become, outdated syndication arrangements mean Australia’s legacy media has to pretend to take it seriously. And our own conservative media just can’t resist joining in the mother country’s culture wars.

An Australian Financial Review opinion piece by the masthead’s European correspondent Andrew Tillett took the opportunity to rap the knuckles of the ABC, the BBC and “their alleged cabals of leftist journalists and content producers”, while Jacquelin Magnay at The Australian called for a clean-out at the BBC due to its pivot “from providing factual news to becoming an activist for the trans lobby and promoting pro-Gaza voices”.

Trump, of course, was not to be left out of the pile-on, with his press secretary Karoline Leavitt calling the BBC “100 percent fake news” — and giving the UK Telegraph another front page to keep the story alive for another day. Overnight, Trump got back into the headlines as he announced his trademark US$1 billion demand on media that displeases him.

It’s not the first time Britain’s Tory media have brought down a BBC boss for being insufficiently right wing. Back in 1987, Thatcher appointed ex-Daily Mail boss Marmaduke Hussey as BBC chair. Within three months, he shocked the niceties of British institutional life when he fired director-general Alastair Milne over the BBC’s reporting on the conservative government.

Here we are almost 40 years later: another puffed-up scandal. Another BBC head falling to the outrage of the British Tory press.

Christopher Warren is an Australian journalist and Crikey’s media correspondent. He was federal secretary of the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance (MEAA) until April 2015, and is a past president of the International Federation of Journalists. This article was first published by Crikey and is republished by Asia Pacific Report with permission.

Australian-Lebanese journalist and commentator Antoinette Lattouf’s unfair dismissal case win against the public broadcaster ABC in the Federal Court on Wednesday is a victory for all those who seek to tell the truth.

It is a breath of fresh air, after almost two years of lies and uncritical reporting about Israel’s genocide from the ABC and commercial media companies.

Lattouf was unfairly sacked in December 2023 for posting on her social media a Human Rights Watch report that detailed Israel’s deliberate starvation of Palestinians in Gaza.

• READ MORE: Other Antoinette Lattouf media freedom reports

Justice Darryl Rangiah found that Lattouf had been sacked for her political opinions, given no opportunity to respond to misconduct allegations and that the ABC breached its Enterprise Agreement and section 772 of the Fair Work Act.

The Federal Court also found that ABC executives — then-chief content officer Chris Oliver-Taylor, editor-in-chief David Anderson and board chair Ita Buttrose — had sacked Lattouf in response to a pro-Israel lobby pressure campaign.

The coordinated email campaign from Zionist groups accused Lattouf of being “antisemitic” for condemning Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

The judge awarded Lattouf A$70,000 in damages, based on findings that her sacking caused “great distress”, and more than $1 million in legal fees.

‘No Lebanese’ claim
Lattouf had alleged that her race or ethnicity had played a part in her sacking, which the ABC had initially responded to by claiming there was no such thing as a “Lebanese, Arab or Middle Eastern Race”, before backtracking.

The court found that this did not play a part in the decision to sack Lattouf.

The ABC’s own reporting of the ruling said “the ABC has damaged its reputation, and public perceptions around its ideals, integrity and independence”.

Outside the court, Lattouf said: “It is now June 2025 and Palestinian children are still being starved. We see their images every day, emaciated, skeletal, scavenging through the rubble for scraps.

“This unspeakable suffering is not accidental, it is engineered. Deliberately starving and killing children is a war crime.

“Today, the court has found that punishing someone for sharing facts about these war crimes is also illegal. I was punished for my political opinion.”

Palestine solidarity groups and democratic rights supporters have celebrated Lattouf’s victory.

An ‘eternal shame’
Palestine Action Group Sydney said: “It is to the eternal shame of our national broadcaster that it sacked a journalist because she opposed the genocide in Gaza.

“There should be a full inquiry into the systematic pro-Israel bias at the ABC, which for 21 months has acted as a propaganda wing of the Israeli military.”

Racial justice organisation Democracy in Colour said the ruling “exposes the systematic silencing taking place in Australian media institutions in regards to Palestine”.

Democracy in Colour chairperson Jamal Hakim said Lattouf was punished for “speaking truth to power”.

“When the ABC capitulated to pressure from the pro-Israel lobby . . .  they didn’t just betray Antoinette — they betrayed their own editorial standards and the Australian public who deserve to know the truth about Israel’s human rights abuses.”

Noura Mansour, national director for Democracy in Colour, said the ABC had been “consistently shutting down valid criticism of the state of Israel” and suppressing the voices of people of colour and Palestinians. She said the national broadcaster had “worked to manufacture consent for the Israeli-US backed genocide”.

Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance chief executive Erin Madeley said: “Instead of defending its journalists, ABC management chose to appease powerful voices . . . they failed in their duty to push back against outside interference, racism and bullying.”

Win for ‘journalistic integrity’
Australian Greens leader Larissa Waters said the ruling was a win for “journalistic integrity and freedom of speech” and that “no one should be punished for speaking out about Gaza”.

Green Left editor Pip Hinman said the ruling was an “important victory for those who stand on the side of truth and justice”.

“It is more important than ever in an increasingly polarised world that journalists speak up and report the truth without fear of reprisal from the rich and powerful.

“Traditional and new media have the reach to shape public opinion. They have had a clear pro-Israel bias, despite international human rights agencies providing horrific data on Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

“Meanwhile, tens of thousands of people around Australia continue to call for an end to the genocide in Gaza in protests every week. But the ABC and corporate media have largely ignored this movement of people from all walks of life. Disturbingly, the corporate media has gone along with some political leaders who claim this anti-war movement is antisemitic.

“As thousands continue to march every week for an end to the genocide in Gaza, the ABC and corporate media organisations have continued to push the lie that the Palestine solidarity movement, and indeed any criticism of Israel, is antisemitic.

“Green Left also hails those courageous mostly young journalists in Gaza, some 200 of whom have been killed by Israel since October 2023.

“Their livestreaming of Israel’s genocide cut through corporate media and political leaders’ lies and today makes it even harder for them to whitewash Israel’s crimes and Western complicity.

“Green Left congratulates Lattouf on her victory. We are proud to stand with the movement for justice and peace in Palestine, which played a part in her victory against the ABC management’s bias.”

Republished from Green Left Magazine with permission.

Despite all the political machinations and hate towards the media coming from the president of the United States, I always thought the majority of Australian politicians supported the role of the press in safeguarding democracy.

And I certainly did not expect Peter Dutton — amid an election campaign, one with citizens heading to the polls on World Press Freedom Day — to come out swinging at the ABC and Guardian Australia, telling his followers to ignore “the hate media”.

I’m not saying Labor is likely to be the great saviour of the free press either.

• READ MORE: On ‘moral panic’ and the courage to speak – the West’s silence on Gaza
• Trump’s war on the media: 10 numbers from US President’s first 100 days
• Other media freedom reports

The ALP has been slow to act on a range of important press freedom issues, including continuing to charge journalism students upwards of $50,000 for the privilege of learning at university how to be a decent watchdog for society.

Labor has increased, slightly, funding for the ABC, and has tried to continue with the Coalition’s plans to force the big tech platforms to pay for news. But that is not enough.

The World Press Freedom Index has been telling us for some time that Australia’s press is in a perilous state. Last year, Australia dropped to 39th out of 190 countries because of what Reporters Without Borders said was a “hyperconcentration of the media combined with growing pressure from the authorities”.

We should know on election day if we’ve fallen even further.

What is happening in America is having a profound impact on journalism (and by extension journalism education) in Australia.

‘Friendly’ influencers
We’ve seen both parties subtly start to sideline the mainstream media by going to “friendly” influencers and podcasters, and avoid the harder questions that come from journalists whose job it is to read and understand the policies being presented.

What Australia really needs — on top of stable and guaranteed funding for independent and reliable public interest journalism, including the ABC and SBS — is a Media Freedom Act.

My colleague Professor Peter Greste has spent years working on the details of such an act, one that would give media in Australia the protection lacking from not having a Bill of Rights safeguarding media and free speech. So far, neither side of government has signed up to publicly support it.

Australia also needs an accompanying Journalism Australia organisation, where ethical and trained journalists committed to the job of watchdog journalism can distinguish themselves from individuals on YouTube and TikTok who may be pushing their own agendas and who aren’t held to the same journalistic code of ethics and standards.

I’m not going to argue that all parts of the Australian news media are working impartially in the best interests of ordinary people. But the good journalists who are need help.

The continuing underfunding of our national broadcasters needs to be resolved. University fees for journalism degrees need to be cut, in recognition of the value of the profession to the fabric of Australian society. We need regulations to force news organisations to disclose when they are using AI to do the job of journalists and broadcasters without human oversight.

And we need more funding for critical news literacy education, not just for school kids but also for adults.

Critical need for public interest journalism
There has never been a more critical need to support public interest journalism. We have all watched in horror as Donald Trump has denied wire services access for minor issues, such as failing to comply with an ungazetted decision to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.

And mere days ago, 60 Minutes chief Bill Owens resigned citing encroachments on his journalistic independence due to pressure from the president.

The Committee to Protect Journalists is so concerned about what’s occurring in America that it has issued a travel advisory for journalists travelling to the US, citing risks under Trump administration policies.

Those of us who cover politically sensitive issues that the US administration may view as critical or hostile may be stopped and questioned by border agents. That can extend to cardigan-wearing academics attending conferences.

While we don’t have the latest Australian figures from the annual Reuters survey, a new Pew Research Centre study shows a growing gap between how much Americans say they value press freedom and how free they think the press actually is. Two-thirds of Americans believe press freedom is critical. But only a third believe the media is truly free to do its job.

If the press isn’t free in the US (where it is guaranteed in their constitution), how are we in Australia expected to be able to keep the powerful honest?

Every single day, journalists put their lives on the line for journalism. It’s not always as dramatic as those who are covering the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, but those in the media in Australia still front up and do the job across a range of news organisations in some fairly poor conditions.

If you care about democracy at all this election, then please consider wisely who you vote for, and perhaps ask their views on supporting press freedom — which is your right to know.

Alexandra Wake is an associate professor in journalism at RMIT University. She came to the academy after a long career as a journalist and broadcaster. She has worked in Australia, Ireland, the Middle East and across the Asia Pacific. Her research, teaching and practice sits at the nexus of journalism practice, journalism education, equality, diversity and mental health.

COMMENTARY: By Bernard Keane

Two moments stand out so far from the Federal Court hearings relating to Antoinette Lattouf’s sacking by the ABC, insofar as they demonstrate how power works in Australia — and especially in Australia’s media.

The first is how the ABC’s senior management abandoned due process in the face of a sustained lobbying effort by a pro-Israel group to have Lattouf taken off air, under the confected basis she was “antisemitic”.

Managing director David Anderson admitted in court that there was a “step missing” in the process that led to her sacking — in particular, a failure to consult with the ABC’s HR area, and a failure to discuss the attacks on Lattouf with Lattouf herself, before kicking her out.

• READ MORE: Legacy media outlets also stand in dock over Gaza: How RNZ, ABC and other Western media failed to challenge Israeli war narratives – Pacific Journalism Review
• Pressure from ‘higher up’ at ABC to sack Antoinette Lattouf from very first day on air, court hears

To this, it might be added, was acting editorial director Simon Melkman’s advice to management that Lattouf had not breached any editorial policies.

Anderson bizarrely singled out Lattouf’s authorship, alongside Cameron Wilson, of a Crikey article questioning the narrative that pro-Palestinian protesters had chanted “gas the Jews”, as basis for his concerns about her, only for one of his executives to point out the article was “balanced and journalistically sound“.

That is, by the ABC’s own admission, there was no basis to sack Lattouf and the sacking was conducted improperly. And yet, here we are, with the ABC tying itself in absurd knots — no such race as Lebanese, indeed — spending millions defending its inappropriate actions in response to a lobbying campaign.

The second moment that stands out is a decision by the court early in the trial to protect the identities of those calling for Lattouf’s sacking.

Abandoned due process
The campaign that the group rolled out prompted the ABC chair and managing director to immediately react — and the ABC to abandon due process and procedural fairness. Yet the court protects their identities.

The reasoning — that the identities behind the complaints should be protected for their safety — may or may not be based on reasonable fears, but it’s the second time that institutions have worked to protect people who planned to undermine the careers of people — specifically, women — who have dared to criticise Israel.

The first was when some members — a minority — of a WhatsApp group supposedly composed of pro-Israel “creatives” discussed how to wreck the careers of, inter alia, Clementine Ford and Lauren Dubois for their criticism of Israel.

The publishing of the identities of this group was held by both the media and the political class to be an outrageous, antisemitic act of “doxxing”, and the federal government rushed through laws to make such publications illegal.

No mention of making the act of trying to destroy people’s careers because they hold different political views — or, cancel culture, as the right likes to call it — illegal.

Whether it’s courts, politicians or the media, it seems that the dice are always loaded in favour of those wanting to crush criticism of Israel, while its victims are left to fend for themselves.

Human rights lawyer and fighter against antisemitism Sarah Schwartz has been repeatedly threatened with (entirely vexatious) lawsuits by Israel supporters for her criticism of Israel, and her discussion of the exploitation of Australian Jews by Peter Dutton.

Opinion | Australian democracy and the rule of law is being damaged by the media’s willingness to abandon due process and attack those who criticise Israel, writes @bernardkeane.

Read it here: https://t.co/gpNuppn31l pic.twitter.com/AyxKdyVMG4

— Crikey (@crikey_news) February 11, 2025

Targeted by another News Corp smear campaign
She’s been targeted by yet another News Corp smear campaign, based on nothing more than a wilfully misinterpreted slide. She has no government or court rushing to protect her.

Meanwhile, Peter Lalor, one of Australia’s finest sports journalists (and I write as someone who can’t abide most sports journalism) lost his job with SEN because he, too, dared to criticise Israel and call out the Palestinian genocide. No-one’s rushing to his aide, either.

No powerful institutions are weighing in to safeguard his privacy, or protect him from the consequences of his opinions.

The individual cases add up to a pattern: Australian institutions, and especially its major media institutions, will punish you for criticising Israel.

Pro-Israel groups will demand you be sacked, they will call for your career to be destroyed. Those groups will be protected.

Media companies will ride roughshod over basic rights and due process to comply with their demands. You will be smeared and publicly vilified on completely spurious bases. Politicians will join in, as Jason Clare did with the campaign against Schwartz and as Chris Minns is doing in NSW, imposing hate speech laws that even Christian groups think are a bad idea.

Australian journalist Antoinette Lattouf was sacked from her job at ABC because she shared an Instagram post from @hrw in which the NGS accused Israel of using starvation as a weapon of war. She is now taking the broadcaster to court. pic.twitter.com/jRmQW2AAl3

— Saul Staniforth (@SaulStaniforth) February 11, 2025

Damaging the fabric of democracy
This is how the campaign to legitimise the Palestinian genocide and destroy critics of the Netanyahu government has damaged the fabric of Australia’s democracy and the rule of law.

The basic rights and protections that Australians should have under a legal system devoted to preventing discrimination can be stripped away in a moment, while those engaged in destroying people’s careers and livelihoods are protected.

Ill-advised laws are rushed in to stifle freedom of speech. Australian Jews are stereotyped as a politically convenient monolith aligned with the Israeli government.

The experience of Palestinians themselves, and of Arab communities in Australia, is minimised and erased. And the media are the worst perpetrators of all.

Bernard Keane is Crikey’s politics editor. Before that he was Crikey’s Canberra press gallery correspondent, covering politics, national security and economics. First published by Crikey.

ABC’s The Pacific has gained rare access into West Papua, a region ruled by Indonesia that has been plagued by military violence and political unrest for decades.

Now, as well as the long-running struggle for independence, some say the Melanesian region’s pristine environment is under threat by the expansion of logging and mining projects, reports The Pacific.

As Indonesia prepares to inaugurate a new President, Prabowo Subianto, a man accused of human rights abuses in the region, West Papua grapples with a humanitarian crisis.

• WATCH: The West Papua episode of The Pacific – Inside Indonesia’s Secret War

The Pacific talks to indigenous Papuans in a refugee settlement about being displaced, teachers who want change to the education system and locals who have hope for a better future.

A spokesman for the Indonesian Foreign Ministry told The Pacific that Indonesia was cooperating with all relevant United Nations agencies and was providing them with up to date information about what is happening in West Papua.

This Inside Indonesia’s Secret War story was produced with the help of ABC Indonesia’s Hellena Souisa.

• The Pacific is hosted by Johnson Raela and Alice Lolohea. #ABCThePacific

New Zealand needs to get tough with Israel. It’s not as if we haven’t done so before.

When NZ authorities busted a Mossad operation in Auckland 20 years ago, the government didn’t say: “Oh well, Israel has the right to defend itself.”

No, it arrested, prosecuted, convicted, imprisoned and deported the Israeli agents, plus made them pay a big sum of damages. And it refused to restore normal diplomatic relations with Israel until Israel apologised to NZ. Which Israel did.

• READ MORE: Israeli agents jailed in NZ over spy case

Today’s government needs to treat Israel the same way it treats other aggressors, like Russia, with the likes of sanctions.

And the government needs to designate Zionism as an inherently racist, terrorist ideology.

Everyone knows that the Gaza War would stop in five minutes if the US stopped arming Israel to the teeth and allowing it to commit genocide with impunity.

Israel is the mass murderer; the US is the enabler of mass murder.

New Zealand is part of the US Empire. The most useful thing we could do is to sever our ties to that empire, something we bravely started in the 1980s with the nuclear-free policy. Also, do these things:

• Develop a genuinely independent foreign policy;
• Get out of US wars, like the one in the Red Sea and Yemen;
• Get out of the Five Eyes spy alliance;
• Close the Waihopai spy base and the GCSB, the NZ agency which runs it;
• Kick out Rocket Lab, NZ’s newest American military base;
• Stop the process of getting entangled with NATO; and
• Stay out of AUKUS, which is simply building an alliance to fight a war with China.

I never thought I’d find myself on the same side of an issue as Don Brash and Richard Prebble but even they have strongly opposed AUKUS.

Zionism is the enemy of the Palestinian people.

US imperialism is the enemy of the Palestinian people and the New Zealand people.

Murray Horton is secretary/organiser of the Anti-Bases Campaign (ABC) and gave this speech last Saturday to a Palestinian solidarity rally at the Bridge of Remembrance, Christchurch.

Editorial staff at Australia’s public broadcaster ABC have again registered a vote of no confidence in managing director David Anderson and senior managers over the handling of complaints by Israeli lobbyists.

At a national meeting of members of the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance this week, staff passed a resolution of no confidence in Anderson and all ABC managers involved in the decision to unfairly dismiss freelance broadcaster Antoinette Lattouf, MEAA said in a statement.

The meeting was held in response to the Fair Work Commission hearings to determine Lattouf’s unfair dismissal claim after she had been sacked from her temporary job as host of ABC Sydney radio’s morning show in December.

• READ MORE: Other reports on ABC and media bias over Israel’s war on Gaza

Staff have also called for ABC’s head of content, Chris Oliver-Taylor, to step down immediately for his role as the ultimate decisionmaker in the dismissal of Lattouf.

“The mishandling of Antoinette Lattouf’s employment has done enormous damage to the integrity and reputation of the ABC,” said MEAA media director Cassie Derrick.

“Evidence provided in the Fair Work Commission hearing about the involvement of David Anderson and Chris Oliver-Taylor in her dismissal has further undermined the confidence of staff in the managing director and his senior managers to be able to protect the independence of the ABC.

“The Lattouf case continues a pattern of ABC journalists, particularly those from culturally diverse backgrounds, lacking support from management when they face criticism from lobby groups, business organisations and politicians.

“For these reasons, Chris Oliver-Taylor should be stood down immediately, while Mr Anderson must demonstrate he is taking the concerns of staff seriously to begin to restore confidence in his leadership.”

Lattouf co-founded Media Diversity Australia (MDA) in 2017, a nonprofit agency which seeks to increase cultural and linguistic diversity in Australia’s news media.

Her parents arrived in Australia as refugees from Lebanon in the 1970s.

Lattouf was born in 1983 in Auburn, New South Wales. She attended various public schools in Western Sydney and studied communications (social inquiry) at the University of Technology Sydney.

Union-led ABC staff call for the resignation of the Australian @ABCNews chief content officer after court documents revealed his role in journalist Antoinette Lattouf’s dismissal for an accurate social media post about Israel’s starvation strategy.https://t.co/eQ8fLBiQL6

— Kenneth Roth (@KenRoth) March 21, 2024

The full motion passed by ABC MEAA members on Wednesday:

“We, MEAA members at the ABC, are outraged by the revelations of how ABC executives have disregarded the independence of the ABC, damaged the public’s trust in our capacity to report without fear or favour, and mistreated our colleague Antoinette Lattouf.

“Staff reaffirm our lack of confidence in managing director David Anderson, and in all ABC managers involved in the decision to unfairly dismiss Antoinette Lattouf.

“Chris Oliver-Taylor has undermined the integrity of the entire ABC through his mismanagement, and should step down from his role as Head of the Content Division immediately.

“We call on ABC management to stop wasting public funds on defending the unfair dismissal case against Antoinette Lattouf, provide her and the public a full apology and reinstate her to ABC airwaves.

“We demand that ABC management implement staff calls for a fair and clear social media policy, robust and transparent complaints process and an audit to address the gender and race pay gap.”

About 25 pro-Palestinian protesters picketed the Auckland headquarters of Radio New Zealand today in the second of two demonstrations claiming that media is providing biased coverage of Israeli’s war on Gaza that is now in its fifth month.

Last week protesters directed their criticism at Television New Zealand which never reported the picket.

Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) secretary Neil Scott called on RNZ and other media to “tell the full truth” about the Israeli genocide in Gaza that has so far killed 30,800 people, mostly women and children.

• READ MORE: NZ news media under fire for ‘bias, propaganda’ in Gaza coverage
• US push­es ‘un­re­al­is­tic’ port plan for aid de­liv­ery as Gaza death toll ris­es
• Israeli army detains female journalist, activist in West Bank raids

At least 20 people — mostly babies and children — have been reported by Palestinian health authorities as having starved to death in the past week.

Scott said news media were providing “one-sided propaganda” in their reportage.

The protest came amid mounting criticism around the world over Western media coverage of the war and growing reports by media monitoring and research agencies of bias.

Protesters also picketed several media offices in Australian cities today, condemning coverage by the public broadcaster ABC.

‘Selective’ news
In a street placard headlined “Silence is complicity”, the protesters said that New Zealand media “selectively chooses” what was reported and broadcast BBC news feeds that were ‘inaccurate and misleading”.

“The media sculpts information to create public perceptions rather than informing people of the facts,” Scott said.

He said that news media refused to tell New Zealanders about Palestinian rights such as the “right of the occupied to fight occupation”, and that the occupier — Israel — was obligated to provide for the needs of the people under occupation, such as food, water and health.

Scott also said Palestinians had the right not to be arrested and held without charge, trial or conviction — and a large number of Palestinian detainees were being held under “administrative detention”, effectively Israeli hostages.

Israel is holding more than 8200 Palestinian prisoners, more than 3000 of them without charge.

Scott said that there had been more than 20 weeks of rallies and vigils against the war in New Zealand, “averaging 25 rallies and events per week”, but they had been barely covered by media.

In Sydney, high profile Australian-Lebanese broadcaster Antoinette Lattouf, who has publicly challenged the ABC over its coverage and was ousted for perceived sympathy for the Palestinian plight, said she was “incredibly humbled and moved” by the demonstrations in front of ABC studios.

She has taken legal action against the ABC and the Federal Court on Thursday ordered mediation between her and the ABC management.

Incredibly humbled and moved to see many demonstrations of support today. Outside of FWC in Sydney but also in front of ABC studios across various cities and regions in Australia.
This legal process has been incredibly hard, and the support means more than I can express pic.twitter.com/lOcXz3kmf1

— Antoinette Lattouf (@antoinette_news) March 8, 2024

Television New Zealand will start talks from tomorrow with staff who will lose their jobs in the state broadcaster’s bid to stay “sustainable”.

It is proposed that up to 68 jobs will be cut which equates to 9 percent of its staff.

TVNZ chief executive Jodi O’Donnell told staff today that “tough economic conditions and structural challenges within the media sector” have hit the company’s revenue.

• READ MORE: RNZ’s live blog on the media cuts

She said “difficult choices need to be made” to ensure the broadcaster remained “sustainable”.

Changes like those proposed today were incredibly hard, but TVNZ needed to ensure it was in a stronger position to transform the business to meet the needs of viewers in a digital world.

RNZ understands a hui for all TVNZ news and current affairs staff will be held at 1pm tomorrow. This follows separate morning meetings for Re: News, Fair Go, and Sunday.

A TVNZ staffer told RNZ it was not yet clear what the meetings meant for those programmes — whether they were to be fully cut or face significant redundancies.

RNZ also understands 1News Tonight might also be affected.

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said of the job cuts: “It’s incredibly unsettling”.

He said he felt for the staff there and acknowledged some would be at his media standup in Wellington.

Luxon said all media companies here and around the world were wrestling with a changing media environment.

Minister Shane Jones interrupted and said “a vibrant economy will be good for the media, bye bye”.

More than TVNZ 60 roles to go with 6pm news & current affairs threatened. Increasingly hard for free to air public broadcasters to survive commercially. Time to bite bullet & accept that as with BBC & Oz ABC, public broadcasting needs 2 be publicly funded? https://t.co/oL7awc7ag2

— Helen Clark (@HelenClarkNZ) March 6, 2024

Former prime minister Helen Clark said on X it was becoming increasingly hard for free to air public broadcasters to survive commercially.

She asked if it was time to accept that, as with the BBC and ABC, public broadcasting should be publicly funded.

‘Dire implications for our democracy’
Sunday presenter Miriama Kamo said the news of jobs possibly being axed was “awful”.

“It’s devastating not just for our business, it’s devastating for what it means for our wider society.”

She said along with the likely demise of Newshub it had “dire implications for our democracy”.

When cuts were being made in news programmes at the state broadcaster that indicated how dire things had become.

“I’m very very concerned about what the landscape looks like going forward.”

A TVNZ news staffer who spoke to RNZ on the condition of anonymity said the most disappointing part of the process was finding out there would be job cuts via other media, such as RNZ and The New Zealand Herald.

“Our bosses didn’t have the decency to be transparent about what was going on. You know, they say that they’ve been forthcoming over the past month over what’s going to happen in this company and whatnot — they haven’t.

‘What sort of vision?’
“So it’ll be an interesting day tomorrow to see how widely the team’s affected, and to see what sort of vision they have for TVNZ, because in the time that I’ve been working there they keep talking about this digital transformation, and I haven’t seen any transformation yet.”

The mood among current staff this morning was “pretty pissy”, particularly from those affected.

“Obviously, not impressed,” the person said.

Media commentator Duncan Greive said some TVNZ staff were hopeful an argument could be made against the job losses.

Greive, who also founded The Spinoff, told RNZ’s Midday Report TVNZ staff working on Fair Go, Sunday and Re: News were invited to meetings today, and told to bring support people.

He said staff have told him the news was devastating, but said they didn’t yet know how deep and widespread the cuts would be — leaving them hopeful their teams would not be as impacted on as they feared.

Meanwhile, an organisation supporting news media staff said the hundreds of people facing redunancy would struggle to find new work in the industry.

Deeply unsettling
Media chaplaincy general manager Elesha Gordon said it was deeply unsettling for those whose livelihoods were on the line.

She said 368 people (from Newshub and TVNZ) with very specialised skillsets would be stepping out into an industry that would not have jobs for them.

Gordon said the proposed cuts were a “cruel and unfair symptom” of the industry’s financial state.

Last week, TVNZ flagged further cost cutting as it posted a first half-year loss linked to reduced revenue and asset write-offs.

The state-owned broadcaster’s interim financial results showed total revenue had fallen 13.5 percent from last year to $155.9 million.

Its net loss for the six months ended December was $16.8m compared to a profit of $4.8m the year before.

O’Donnell said the broadcaster’s management had tried to cut operating costs over the last year but there was now no option other than to look at job losses.

‘No easy answers’
“There are no easy answers, and media organisations locally and globally are grappling with the same issues. Our priority is to support our people through the change process — we’ll take the next few weeks to collect, consider and respond to feedback from TVNZers before making any final decisions.”

A confirmed structure is expected to be finalised by early April.

The layoffs at TVNZ have come one week after the shock announcement by the US corporation Warner Bros Discovery that it intended closing its Newshub operation in New Zealand by the end of June.

It means up to 300 people will lose their jobs.

Broadcasting Minister Melissa Lee told RNZ Checkpoint yesterday she had spoken to TVNZ bosses last week but it was not up to her to reveal details of the conversation.

She declined to comment on Newshub’s offer to TVNZ to team up in some ways to cut costs, nor suggestions TVNZ could cut its 6pm news to half-an-hour or cancel current affairs programming.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

The incoming chair of the ABC, Kim Williams, must immediately move to restore the reputation of Australia’s national broadcaster by addressing concerns about the impact of external pressures on editorial decision making, says the media union.

The Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance, the union representing journalists at the ABC, today called on Williams to work with unions to support staff who were under attack, reaffirm the commitment to cultural diversity in the workplace, and uphold the standards of reporting without fear or favour that the public expected of the ABC.

MEAA welcomed the appointment of Williams, a former chief executive of News Corp Australia, noting that he had decades of media experience including senior management positions at the ABC, commercial broadcast media and arts administration in the past, and that he had been recommended by an independent nomination panel.

• READ MORE: PM announces Kim Williams as new ABC chair
• Ita Buttrose backs David Anderson after ABC board defiant over ‘abhorrent and incorrect’ journalists’ criticism
• ABC staff ‘have lost confidence’ in boss in defending public trust in Israel row
• Cancelling the journalist: Fuhttps://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/jan/23/abc-managing-director-david-anderson-no-confidence-vote-fails-ita-buttrose-supportrore over ABC’s coverage of Israel war on Gaza
• Back SA over genocide case, ‘don’t yield to pressure’, Hania tells NZ

The acting chief executive of MEAA, Adam Portelli, said the new chair would take office at a critical time for the ABC’s future following a staff vote of no confidence in managing director David Anderson earlier this week over the handling of a crisis over pressure from pro-Israeli lobbyists in the war on Gaza.

“On Monday, union members overwhelmingly said they had lost confidence in David Anderson because of his failure to address very real concerns about the way the ABC deals with external pressure and supports journalists from First Nations and culturally diverse backgrounds when they are under attack,” he said.

“Public trust in the ABC as an organisation that will always pursue frank and fearless journalism has been damaged, and management under Mr Anderson has not demonstrated it is taking these concerns seriously.

Buttrose ‘completely out of touch’
“Following yesterday’s board meeting, the current chair, Ita Buttrose, revealed she is completely out of touch with the concerns felt in newsrooms across Australia,” Portelli said.

“Dozens of staff have told us their first hand experiences of feeling unsupported by management when under external attack and the negative impact this is having on their ability to do their jobs and on the reputation and integrity of the ABC. But Ms Buttrose failed to acknowledge these concerns.

“ABC journalists have put forward five very reasonable suggestions to restore the confidence of staff in the managing director but at this stage, Mr Anderson has not committed to an urgent meeting as they requested.”

Portelli said MEAA was optimistic that Williams would bring a more collaborative approach to dealing with issues of cultural safety and editorial integrity than had been witnessed under Buttrose.

“He must understand that nothing less than the reputation of the ABC is at stake here,” Portelli said.

Union members at the Australian public broadcaster ABC have today passed a vote of no confidence in managing director David Anderson for failing to defend the integrity of the ABC and its staff from outside attacks, reports the national media union.

The vote was passed overwhelmingly at a national online meeting attended by more than 200 members of the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance (MEAA), the union said in a statement.

Union members have called on Anderson to take immediate action to win back the confidence of staff following a series of incidents which have damaged the reputation of the ABC as a trusted and independent source of news.

• READ MORE: Cancelling the journalist: Furore over ABC’s coverage of Israel war on Gaza
• Back SA over genocide case, ‘don’t yield to pressure’, Hania tells NZ

The vote of ABC union staff rebuked Anderson, with one of the broadcaster’s most senior journalists, global affairs editor John Lyons, reported in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age as saying he was “embarrassed” by his employer, which he said had “shown pro-Israel bias” and was failing to protect staff against complaints.

This followed revelations of a series of emails by the so-called Lawyers for Israel lobby group alleged to be influential in the sacking of Lebanese Australian journalist Antoinette Lattouf for her criticism on social media of the Israeli genocidal war on Gaza that has killed 25,000 people so far, mostly women and children.

Another pro-Israel WhatsApp lobbying the ABC.
It makes me sick in the stomach to see people celebrate my sacking.
It makes me sick in the stomach to see an alleged Ita Buttrose response saying I’m now gone.
It makes me worry about the ABC’s integrity https://t.co/6qTeU7f8Wz pic.twitter.com/L9Te8A1Ynx

— Antoinette Lattouf (@antoinette_news) January 22, 2024

Staff have put management on notice that if it does not begin to address the current crisis by next Monday, January 29, staff will consider further action.

The acting chief executive of MEAA, Adam Portelli, said staff had felt unsupported by the ABC’s senior management when they have been criticised or attacked from outside.

Message ‘clear and simple’
“The message from staff today is clear and simple: David Anderson must demonstrate that he will take the necessary steps to win back the confidence of staff and the trust of the Australian public,” he said.

“This is the result of a consistent pattern of behaviour by management when the ABC is under attack of buckling to outside pressure and leaving staff high and dry.

“Public trust in the ABC is being undermined. The organisation’s reputation for frank and fearless journalism is being damaged by management’s repeated lack of support for its staff when they are under attack from outside.

BREAKING NEWS:
Censorship Crisis at the ABC.

Senior ABC journalist accuses ABC of bowing to “a group of lawyers lobbying for a foreign power.”

“The clue is in the name: ‘Lawyers for Israel’ thought that they could run a campaign to bully an ABC journalist out of her job —… pic.twitter.com/VbyFfGqpnB

— Peter Cronau (@PeterCronau) January 22, 2024

“Journalists at the ABC — particularly First Nations people, and people from culturally diverse backgrounds — increasingly don’t feel safe at work; and the progress that has been made in diversifying the ABC has gone backwards.

“Management needs to act quickly to win that confidence back by putting the integrity of the ABC’s journalism above the impact of pressure from politicians, unaccountable lobby groups and big business.”

The full motion passed by MEAA members at today’s meeting reads as follows:

MEAA members at the ABC have lost confidence in our managing director David Anderson. Our leaders have consistently failed to protect our ABC’s independence or protect staff when they are attacked. They have consistently refused to work collaboratively with staff to uphold the standards that the Australian public need and expect of their ABC.

Winning staff and public confidence back will require senior management:

• Backing journalism without fear or favour;
• Working collaboratively with unions to build a culturally informed process for supporting staff who face criticism and attack;
• Take urgent action on the lack of security and inequality that journalists of colour face;
• Working with unions to develop a clearer and fairer social media policy; and
• Upholding a transparent complaints process, in which journalists who are subject to complaints are informed and supported.

A further resolution passed unanimously by the meeting read:

MEAA members at the ABC will not continue to accept the failure of management to protect our colleagues and the public. If management does not work with us to urgently fix the ongoing crisis, ABC staff will take further action to take a stand for a safe, independent ABC.

The Age has revealed the dismissal of ABC broadcaster Antoinette Lattouf last December 20 was the nasty fruit of a campaign waged against chair Ita Buttrose and managing director David Anderson.

The official reason for Lattouf’s dismissal was ordinary: she shared a post by Human Rights Watch about Israel “using starvation of civilians as a weapon of war in Gaza”, calling it “a war crime”.

It also noted the express intention of Israeli officials to pursue this strategy. Actions were also documented: the deliberate blocking of food, water and fuel “while wilfully obstructing the entry of aid”.

• READ MORE: Which Australian journalists and politicians have gone on trips to Israel and Palestine?
• Journalists need to ‘take a stand’ over the Gaza carnage after latest killings – David Robie
• ABC Alumni statement on Antoinette Lattouf and ABC independence
• RSF condemns Israel over ‘silencing of media’ – 31 Palestinian journalists in jail, 80 plus killed

Lattouf shared it after management directed staff not to post on “matters of controversy”.

Prior to The Age revelations, much had been made of Lattouf’s fill-in role as a radio presenter — which was intended for five shows.

The Australian, owned by News Corp, had issues with Lattouf’s statements on various online platforms. It found it strange in December that she was appointed “despite her very public anti-Israel stance”.

She was accused of denying that some protesters had called for Jews to be gassed outside the Sydney Opera House on October 7. She also dared to accuse the Israeli Defence Forces of committing rape.

Leaked messages from a WhatsApp group called ‘Lawyers for Israel’ indicate that Australia’s public broadcaster – ABC – might have been lobbied into firing journalist Antoinette Lattouf.@meenakshirv reports. pic.twitter.com/1Nfl2kEDx6

— The Listening Post (@AJListeningPost) January 19, 2024

‘Lot of people really upset’
It was considered odd that she discussed food and water shortages in Gaza and “an advertising campaign showing corpses reminiscent of being wrapped in Muslim burial cloths”. That “left a lot of people really upset’,” The Australian said.

If war is hell, Lattouf was evidently not allowed to go into quite so much detail about it — at least concerning the fate of Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli war machine.

What has also come to light is that the ABC’s managers were not targeting Lattouf on their own. Pressure had been exercised from outside the media organisation.

According to The Age, WhatsApp messages by a group called “Lawyers for Israel” had been sent to the ABC as part of a coordinated campaign.

Sydney property lawyer Nicky Stein told members of that group to contact the federal Minister for Communications asking “how Antoinette is hosting the morning ABC Sydney show” the day Lattouf was sacked.

They said employing Lattouff breached Clause 4 of the ABC code of practice on “impartiality”.

Stein went on to insist that: “It’s important ABC hears from not just individuals in the community but specifically from lawyers so they feel there is an actual legal threat.”

No ‘generic’ response
She goes on to say that a “proper” rather than “generic” response was expected “by COB [close of business] today or I would look to engage senior counsel”.

Did such threats have any basis? Even Stein admits: “There is probably no actionable offence against the ABC but I didn’t say I would be taking one — just investigating one. I have said that they should be terminating her employment immediately.”

It was designed to attract attention from ABC chairperson Ita Buttrose, and it did.

Robert Goot, deputy president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry and part of the same group, boasted of information he had received that Lattouf would be “gone from morning radio from Friday” because of her “anti-Israeli” stance.

There has been something of a journalistic exodus from the ABC of late.

Nour Haydar, a political reporter in the ABC’s Parliament House bureau and another journalist of Lebanese descent, resigned on January 12 citing concern about the ABC’s coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza.

There had been, for instance, the creation of a “Gaza advisory panel” at the behest of ABC news director Justin Stevens, ostensibly to improve coverage.

Journalists need to ‘take a stand’ over the Gaza carnage after latest killings

Must not ‘take sides’
“Accuracy and impartiality are core to the service we offer audiences,” Stevens told staff. “We must stay independent and not ‘take sides’.”

This pointless assertion can only ever be a threat because it acts as an injunction on staff and a judgment against sources that do not favour the line, however credible they might be.

What proves acceptable, a condition that seems to have paralysed the ABC, is to never say that Israel massacres, commits war crimes and brings about conditions approximating genocide.

Little wonder then that coverage of South Africa’s genocide case against Israel in the International Court of Justice does not get top billing on the ABC.

Palestinians and Palestinian militias, however, can always be described as savages, rapists and baby slayers. Throw in fanaticism and Islam and you have the complete package ready for transmission.

Coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the mainstream media of most Western countries, as the late Robert Fisk pointed out, repeatedly asserts these divisions.

After her resignation, Haydar told the Sydney Morning Herald: “Commitment to diversity in the media cannot be skin deep.  Culturally diverse staff should be respected and supported even when they challenge the status quo.”

#NoFearNoFavour https://t.co/JXq9TiI6Zu

— Antoinette Lattouf (@antoinette_news) January 16, 2024

Sharing divisive topics
Haydar’s argument about cultural diversity should not obscure the broader problem facing the ABC: policing the way opinions and material on war, and any other divisive topic, is shared with the public.

The issue goes less to cultural diversity than permitted intellectual breadth.

Lattouf, for her part, is pursuing remedies through the Fair Work Commission and seeking funding through a GoFundMe page, steered by Lauren Dubois.

“We stand with Antoinette and support the rights of workers to be able to share news that expresses an opinion or reinforces a fact, without fear of retribution.”

Kenneth Roth, former head of Human Rights Watch, expressed his displeasure at Lattouf’s treatment, suggesting the ABC had erred.

ABC’s senior management, via a statement from Anderson, preferred the route of craven denial. He rejected “any claim that it has been influenced by any external pressure, whether it be an advocacy group or lobby group, a political party, or commercial entity”.

Pacific Media Watch: In response to the ABC management statement since this article was published, ABC Alumni said in a statement: “Given the precipitate nature of the decision-making in this instance, and the apparent disproportion between the severity of the ‘offence’ and the ABC’s response, [we think] that [the management] statement leaves many questions unanswered.”

Staff who “live in constant fear of retribution”, rather than have confidence in procedurally fair processes of accountability, could quickly become self-censoring, warned the Alumni statement.

Dr Binoy Kampmark is a senior lecturer in global studies at RMIT University, Melbourne. This article was first published by Green Left Magazine and is republished here with permission.

Australia’s support for the Solomon Islands media sector is long-standing and is now providing support for the Solomon Islands Broadcasting Corporation (SIBC) to get ready for the 2023 Pacific Games in November.

ABC International Development (ABCID) has delivered more training to the SIBC earlier this month which focused on the use of mobile journalism (MoJo) kits.

More than half of the SIBC staff received training from Dave McMeekin, a leading content quality advisor from ABC News in Adelaide, on September 12-16.

• READ MORE: Other Pacific Games reports

The ABC recently distributed MoJo kits to all its locations in Australia so the SIBC staff are now using the best equipment available as preferred by journalists in Australia.

MoJo kits consist of an android phone, microphone, tripod, and other components that allow a single person to capture high-quality audio and video.

The content can be recorded on the phone for later use or sent back to a studio for immediate broadcast.

These kits are designed to be portable and operated by one person.

Setting up, maintenance
During the training sessions, conducted in small groups of four or five SIBC staff members, the focus was on setting up and maintaining the MoJo kits.

In addition, the training included techniques for visual storytelling, which makes it easier to capture short stories in the field.

Practical exercises were carried out on the streets of Honiara, including in the Central Market and the Art Gallery.

Last Saturday, SIBC journalists used the MoJo kits to report on the Solomon Airlines Peace Marathon — putting into practice the training and equipment they will use during the Pacific Games.

As part of the Australian project, managed by ABCID, SIBC will receive two MoJo kits.

SIBC also plans to purchase two additional kits, with one of them being stationed in Gizo.

These four kits will be used by SIBC reporters to file stories leading up to and during the Pacific Games.

The Pacific Games in the Solomon Islands runs from November 19 until December 2.

Republished with permission from SBM Online.

Radio Australia’s Pacific Beat reports today on how Fiji has fared under the draconian Media Act that has restricted media freedom over the past decade.

There are hopes that state-endorsed media censorship will stop in Fiji following last month’s change in government to the People’s Alliance-led coalition.

Reported by Fiji correspondent Lice Movono, the podcast outlines former Fiji Times editor-in-chief Netani Rika’s experiences of repression under the former FijiFirst government.

• LISTEN TO ABC PACIFIC BEAT: Media freedom under the new Fiji government
• READ MORE: Former Fiji Times editor has no regrets about resisting censorship

But a change in government has also been reflected by a change in attitude towards the media.

It comes as the Fijian Broadcasting Corporation board has terminated the contract of FBC’s chief executive Riyaz Sayed-Khaiyum amid reports that the CEO for the public broadcaster earned more money than the prime minister of the country.

Media veterans are also hoping for changes to Fiji’s controversial Media Act, or its complete removal, to protect freedom of the press.

Movono also reports on Islands Business editor Samantha Magick’s view on media freedom and retired journalism professor Dr David Robie, who founded the Pacific Media Centre, expressing his “scepticism” over whether the hoped for relaxed rules would go far enough for the global RSF Media Freedom Index which ranks Fiji at just 102nd out of 180 countries.

The media item is rounded off with an interview with Attorney-General Siromi Turaga who says the repression of the past should never have happened.

He said he would directly work on the changes to the Act, once the minister responsible for information moves to suggest changes.

“The coalition government is going to provide a different approach, a truly democratic way of dealing with press freedom,” Turaga said.

“We’re going to ensure they have freedom to broadcast to impart knowledge information to members of the public.”

Interviewed:
Netani Rika, former editor of The Fiji Times and former Fiji Television manager of news and current affairs
Samantha Magick, editor of Islands Business
Dr David Robie, retired journalism professor and editor of Asia Pacific Report
Siromi Turaga, Attorney-General of Fiji

In other items on today’s Pacific Beat:

• Fiji’s top cop and head of prisons are suspended pending an investigation by a special tribunal.
• A programme is launched in the Australian state of Victoria to get seasonal workers road-ready.
• Pacific women take part in Tennis Australia’s leadership programme, coinciding with the Australian Open.
• And scientists warn some sharks are on the brink of extinction.

Reporter Lice Movono

Presenter: Prianka Srinivasan

Many organisations, NGOs, churches and student leaders have called on the Indonesian government in Jakarta to consider Papua Governor Lukas Enembe’s health problems with kindness.

The student organisations that have appealed to President Joko Widodo and the chair of the anti-corruption agency KPK include the International Alliance of Papuan Students Associations Overseas (IAPSAO), which has an affiliate in Aotearoa New Zealand.

The letter sent to President Jokowi and the KPK stressed the universal human rights of Governor Enembe over his poor health. He has been governor since 2013.

• READ MORE: Fate of Papua’s Governor Enembe – the ‘son of Koteka’ – lies in balance amid allegations
• Other reports on Governor Lukas Enembe

Governor Enembe, 55, has been accused of corruption in what is widely seen as a politically motivated case given his position in Indonesia’s centrist Democratic Party with a general election due early in 2024.

The allegations against him have spread to Australia, but his lawyers have dismissed all accusations.

According to the public broadcaster ABC in Australia, the authorities have said “the total amount under investigation was in the ‘trillions of rupiah’, or hundreds of millions of dollars”.

The governor’s lawyers said he had a swollen leg and general poor health due to diabetes and a series of strokes. In recent years he had had heart and pancreatic surgery.

Risk of ‘political instability’
In the letter, signed by the presidents of the Papuan Student Association in the USA-Canada, Germany, Russia, Japan and Oceania, was a plea that the central government ought to consider the risk of “political instability” in the province due to Governor Enembe’s deteriorating health.

Although the governor is unable to be physically present in the office, government services in Papua province are running normally.

While going through medical treatment from home, Governor Enembe encouraged all civil servants in the province to “deliver their responsibility with full commitment”.

Since he has been banned from travelling for medical treatment overseas, Governor Enembe has been examined twice at his home in Jayapura by medical teams from Mount Elizabeth Hospital in Singapore.

The team, comprising several expert doctors and nurses, was brought in from Singapore for the first visit because the governor had been forbidden to seek treatment abroad.

Dr Anton Mote, the governor’s personal doctor who led the first examination, named the team as Cheng Ho Patrick (a cardiologist), Mariana Binti Ayob and Snooky Tabiliras Lagas (a nurse). The examination was conducted on October 11.

According to Dr Mote, Governor Enembe needed to get treatment in Singapore

Jakarta unresponsive
Tabloid Jubi reports that prior to and after the first examination, Governor Enembe’s family and lawyers had asked the central government of Indonesia to consider his health by allowing him to get treatment in Singapore. However, Jakarta had not responded.

“That’s the reason we brought in a doctor from Singapore because [Governor Enembe] must continue to receive continuous medical care,” said Dr Mote.

Meanwhile, the Papua Times reports that KPK had a coordinating meeting about the case involving Governor Enembe on October 24.

This led to a decision to send a team of medical doctors from the KPK and the Indonesian Medical Association (IDI) to examine Governor Enembe.

Laurens Ikinia is a West Papuan postgraduate communication studies student at AUT University.

The Australian government is moving fast to reset relations with Australia’s Pacific partners, including a larger Pacific role for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Detailed research undertaken late last year for the ABC in our six key Pacific markets (Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Fiji, Vanuatu and Tonga) confirms that the ABC today is used, valued and highly trusted by Pacific audiences.

This result has been made possible through the ABC’s multi-channel approach, and by thoughtful programming made with Pacific partners and designed specifically for Pacific audiences.

• READ MORE: Other reports on Radio Australia in the Pacific

In terms of reach, access to AM/FM radio today is significantly higher than access to shortwave across the Pacific, and our research confirms that the most effective way today to engage audiences in urban and peri-urban regions is through FM radio transmission.

ABC Radio Australia currently has 13 transmitters across the Pacific. ABC Australia (TV) broadcasts to 16 Pacific island nations and territories under more than 25 distribution deals.

Meanwhile, a transition to digital and social media in the Pacific is also well underway. Smartphone use is high in urban areas, and increasingly, the ABC connects to its Pacific audiences via Facebook and through our digital offerings.

Our multi-channel approach is paying off. Total Pacific user interactions late last year with the ABC, whether via the ABC website, the ABC app or social media channels, were reportedly higher than usage and interactions with any other international provider, including the BBC, CNN, RNZ and CGTN.

Big jump in numbers
In the Papua New Guinea market, the research showed that more than half of all respondents had either watched ABC Australia (TV), listened to ABC Radio Australia or accessed the ABC online in the second half of 2021. That’s a big jump in audience numbers within just a few years.

The Australian government has plans to review the merits of restoring shortwave radio and the ABC will be contributing to that process. Part of that will include understanding how many people still have access to shortwave radios and the interest or need to use them as an information source.

In terms of content, the ABC’s unique advantage lies in its commitment to, and relationship with, Pacific audiences. We aim to be local. Our Asia–Pacific newsroom is the only one of its kind in Australia, with 50 journalists and producers telling the stories that matter to Indo-Pacific audiences, told in Bahasa Indonesia, Tok Pisin and Chinese as well as English.

Our flagship daily current affairs programme, Pacific Beat on ABC Radio Australia, features interviews with leaders and newsmakers, attracting audiences of all ages and genders. Then there’s Sistas, Let’s Talk (conversations with inspirational Pacific women), Wantok (Pacific-focused news and current affairs in Tok Pisin, Solomon Islands pidgin and Bislama), Island Music (reggae, dancehall and R’n’B with a focus on the Pacific region) and Pacific Playtime (for kids and families across the region).

A shared love of sport offers opportunities to strengthen social ties across the Pacific, and particularly to engage young people. ABC Radio Australia takes the men’s and women’s National Rugby League competitions to lovers of the sport across the region.

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade supports the ABC to produce the only pan-Pacific sport-focused TV show, That Pacific Sports Show, and a fresh and humorous sport-oriented radio show and podcast, Can You Be More Pacific?, hosted by Australian and Pacific sportspeople.

This commitment to genuine partnership with the Pacific is paying off. The proportion of respondents in Pacific markets last year who valued the ABC across all its channels as a “trusted source of news and information” was comparable to that in Australia, at a very high 75 percent.

Pacific content locally available
It’s also worth noting that all the content we produce for Pacific audiences is available domestically in Australia, helping to maintain regional ties and build greater Australian awareness about our Pacific neighbours.

The ABC’s International Development Unit, supported by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and donors like USAID and the United Nations, works with partners across the region to enhance journalism skills and media capacity.

The ABC also provides skills development training for specific challenges like election coverage and emergency broadcasting, plus support for media associations, like the Media Association of the Solomon Islands, which has been active in campaigning for press access and freedom in the Solomons.

The government has committed to increase funding to the ABC’s international programme by $8 million a year over the next four years. The focal points of this strategy are enhanced regional transmission, more content production, and increased media capacity training for Pacific partners.

This approach has been informed by the ABC’s own proposals.

Over recent years, various ideas have been floated for a new administrative process or organisation to “manage” Australia’s media presence in the Pacific. That would add unnecessary bureaucracy.

There’s a lot more the ABC could do in and for the Pacific. The ABC today has the strategy, systems and relationships in the Pacific to enable rapid expansion, given funding support.

And our research confirms there is a demand for it.

Claire M. Gorman is the head of international services at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Republished from The Strategist with the author’s permission.

Auckland University of Technology has unreservedly apologised to a former academic turned Australian MP for its botched handling of her complaint regarding sexual harassment by a former staff member.

Dr Marisa Paterson was director of Australian National University’s Centre for Gambling Research in 2020 when she publicly accused internationally-respected gambling expert Max Abbott of stalking and harassing her.

He stepped down as dean of the School of Health and Environmental Sciences​ after the story was aired by the news organisation Stuff. He later resigned as a professor.

• READ MORE: Dr Marisa Paterson, who previously revealed she was sexually harassed, reaches settlement with New Zealand university
• The 2021 Davenport report into harassment and sexual harassment at AUT

In a joint statement with the university issued through the Office of the Human Rights Proceedings today, Dr Paterson, now a Member of the ACT Legislative Assembly, said she made the complaint because she wanted the harmful behaviour to stop and for the situation to be investigated.

“My desperation in lodging a formal complaint was extreme — my career was everything to me and I knew that making a complaint would have significant implications. The independent report that was commissioned by AUT and this apology, are public recognition that I did not experience the appropriate or adequate response to the harm I experienced.”

Dr Paterson said in addition to the sexual harassment, she suffered “long-term distress and implications” from having to fight an institution for an adequate response.

“But today, what I went through is being publicly recognised. And my voice today is being heard — most importantly by AUT. It is accounted for and it is being recognised as an equal through this joint statement. My statement today is not one of forgiveness. This is a public step in leadership.

“This can never happen again.”

‘Poor investigation’
Chancellor Rob Campbell said AUT offered its unreserved apology to Dr Paterson for its poor investigation into her complaint and lack of communication through the process.

“We would also like to recognise your courage in coming forward, and to thank you for providing the opportunity for AUT to learn from this and initiate a process of culture change which we are confident will improve the experience of people learning and working in the university,” he said.

“We hope that our actions will be viewed as reflecting a survivor-centred approach and positive shift in institutional culture.

“We trust that this genuine apology will support you in your pathway forward.”

He said the university was already working to respond the 36 recommendations in the independent review, including the development of a stand-alone sexual harassment policy, a new three tier complaints process, and training for all managers.

The Office of the Human Rights Proceedings said the apology and joint statement was a positive outcome for both sides.

‘Absolute tenacity’
Director Michael Timmons said it reflected “Dr Paterson’s absolute tenacity and her strength in accessing justice for what happened to her”.

“But it also shows AUT has acknowledged what has happend to her and is publicly holding themselves to account.”

He conceded the outcome had been a long time coming.

In an interview with the ABC in Australia, Dr Paterson said: “I am feeling vindicated. I feel that today there has been some justice served. This has been many years in the making for me, and I think that this is a big day for human rights and for women.”

Dr Paterson first laid a complaint with the Human Rights Commission in November 2021 but it was not resolved.

Mid-way through this year, she contacted the Office of the Human Rights Proceedings, which is responsible for providing publicly-funded representation to complainants taking legal action under the Human Rights Act.

Timmons said the settlement has avoided the need for further legal proceedings.

“This case is really important because it says to big institutions, particularly tertiary institutions, that they have firm obligations under the Human Rights Act for the actions of their staff.”

Max Abbott’s name was not mentioned in the apology or statement as the case only concerned AUT’s actions, he said.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

The Brussels-based International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has condemned the censoring of the Solomon Islands Broadcasting Corporation (SIBC) as an “assault on press freedom” and an “unacceptable development” amid mounting concern over China’s influence on the media and security.

“The censoring of the Solomon Island’s national broadcaster is an assault on press freedom and an unacceptable development for journalists, the public, and the democratic political process,” the IFJ said in a statement.

“The IFJ calls for the immediate reinstatement of independent broadcasting arrangements in the Solomon Islands.”

• READ MORE: Solomon Islands orders national broadcaster SIBC to ‘self-censor news’
• Campaign over Solomons media freedom ‘misguided’, claims PM’s office
• Other Solomon islands media freedom reports

The government of the Solomon Islands on August 1 ordered the national radio and television broadcaster SIBC to censor its programmes of anti-government voices.

The Prime Minister and Cabinet Office of the Solomon Islands mandated the SIBC to censor its programmes of perspectives critical of the incumbent government.

According to SIBC staff, the acting chairman of the board, William Parairato, outlined the new guidelines on July 29.

Both news and paid programmes are to be vetted in line with government regulations, as the government attempts to crack down on “disunity”.

SIBC now beholden
Special Secretary to the Prime Minister Albert Kabui indicated that the SIBC would now be beholden to a government-appointed board of directors, who would be appointed solely from the Prime Ministerial office.

The SIBC, which has moved from a state-owned enterprise to receiving all funding from the ruling government, had previously allowed paid programmes to broadcast criticism of the government.

The broadcaster also provided full live coverage of Australian Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong’s visit to Honiara in June, with coverage funded by the Australian High Commission.

Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavere has been unavailable for comment, as reported by several news organisations.

In recent months the Solomon Islands has further developed existing links to China, which the Australian Broadcaster Corporation argues is indicative of “authoritarian and anti-journalist” developments in Solomon Islands’ leadership.

The IFJ raised concerns surrounding press freedoms in the Solomon Islands during Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s visit to the Pacific in May.

Wang Yi’s press tour of the Solomon Islands featured heavily restricted press conferences, with local journalists collectively confined to one question for the nation’s Foreign Minister.

Sourced from an IFJ dispatch.

ANALYSIS: By Graeme Dobell

Australia’s polity grapples with the need to remake and rebuild our media voice in the South Pacific.

Domestic political battles and budget cuts have degraded the central role Australia played in islands journalism in the 20th century. Australia’s media voice in the South Pacific is at its weakest since Robert Menzies launched the shortwave radio service in 1939.

Now we must reimagine that role and empower that voice for the 21st century — a new model of talking with, not to, the South Pacific.

• READ MORE: Other reports on ABC in the Pacific

The policy failure that has so weakened our voice in the past decade had one deeply familiar element — recurring Oz amnesia about our interests, influence and values in the islands.

See the amnesia lament offered by a Canberra wise owl, Nick Warner, in his Financial Review op-ed about “Australia’s long Pacific stupor’”: “For two generations, since the end of World War II, Australia has squandered the chance to build deep and enduring relations with our neighbours in the South Pacific. And now it’s almost too late.”

This is a candid view from the heart of the Canberra system. You don’t get much more plugged in and powerful than Warner, who served as our top diplomat in Papua New Guinea, led the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands, and then headed the Department of Defence, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service and the Office of National Assessments.

‘Stupor’ history framing
Warner’s “stupor” history frames his diagnosis of how China could clinch a security treaty with Solomon Islands:

“China is now seemingly entrenched in Solomons and will also be looking for other opportunities for a base elsewhere in the Pacific. But, for better or worse, Pacific politics seldom provide certainty. It’s not too late for Australia to shore up its place in the South Pacific and to protect its strategic interests.”

The need to “shore up our place” that Warner points to brings us back to a specific example of the stupor/amnesia — the degrading of our media voice in the islands and the role of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

In the South Pacific, Radio Australia and the international television service, ABC Australia, still do great work. But they have only a third of the budget they enjoyed a decade ago. Underline that stupor/amnesia fact: spending on the ABC as our Indo-Pacific media voice has been cut by two- thirds.

In 2014, the Abbott government hacked into the ABC by killing funding for international television, a sad, bad and dumb decision that also decimated Radio Australia.

Political payback in Canberra produced a gang-that-couldn’t-shoot-straight tragedy in the South Pacific. The Abbott aim was to scratch the anti-Aunty itch, but he badly wounded a major instrument of Australian foreign policy. The damage was compounded when the ABC turned off shortwave in 2017; here again was a domestic focus that damaged our regional interests.

For an account of all this, see ASPI’s “Hard news and free media as the sharp edge of Australia’s soft power“.

Aunty as the villain
In this long-running melodrama with elements of dark comedy, a valiant ABC is also a victim — with foes instead seeing Aunty as villain. What a long run the drama has had: three generations of Murdochs have warred with Aunty, starting in the 1930s with Keith Murdoch’s bitter fight against the creation of an independent ABC news service.

A re-run of the domestic battle devaluing our international voice happened with Labor’s election campaign launch last month of its Indo-Pacific broadcasting strategy, promising the ABC an extra $8 million a year for international programmes, plus a review of whether shortwave should be restored.

Labor’s idea is a good first step to restart Australia’s conversation with the islands, Jemima Garrett writes, but it “seems to be simply pushing out more ‘Australian content’ and crowding the regional airwaves with ‘Australian voices’. This is ‘soft power’ in a crude form – a one-way monologue when what is needed is a dialogue — a 21st century conversation in which Australia and Australians talk ‘with’ and not ‘to’ our Pacific neighbours.”

Preferring hard power to soft power, Prime Minister Scott Morrison called Labor’s policy “farcical”, saying that in the South Pacific, “I sent in the AFP [Australian Federal Police]. The Labor Party wants to send in the ABC, when it comes to their Pacific solution.”

Australia, of course, needs it all—the AFP and the Australian Defence Force, but also the ABC.

In this argument, I declare my love of Aunty. I worked as a journalist for Radio Australia and the ABC (1975–2008) and had the huge privilege of spending much time as a correspondent in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific.

I did break the habit of a lifetime by putting the boot into Aunty when it switched off shortwave. The ABC had damaged its international role, set by parliamentary charter, in favour of its domestic responsibilities.

Soft-power thinking
Labor’s soft-power thinking is work in the minor key compared to the recent effort of parliament’s Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade.

In the final sitting week before the start of the election campaign, the committee issued its report “Strengthening Australia’s relationships in the Pacific”. The media recommendations were the most ambitious to come out of Canberra in many a day:

“The Committee notes the media environment within the Pacific is becoming more contested, and recognises Australia has a national interest in maintaining a visible and active media and broadcasting presence there. The Committee recommends the Australian Government considers steps necessary to expand Australia’s media footprint in the Pacific, including through:

– expanding the provision of Australian public and commercial television and digital content across the Pacific, noting existing efforts by the PacificAus TV initiative and Pacific Australia;

– reinvigorating Radio Australia, which is well regarded in the region, to boost its digital appeal; and

– consider[ing] governance arrangements for an Australian International Media Corporation to formulate and oversee the strategic direction of Australia’s international media presence in the Pacific.’

I own up to the idea for the creation of an Australian international media corporation, contained in my submission [No 21] to the inquiry. The committee’s findings and the idea of a new international body, to build on the ABC foundations, will be the next column in these musings on the Oz media voice in the South Pacific.

This article was first published in The Strategist journal of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI). Graeme Dobell is ASPI’s journalist fellow and this is republished with the author’s permission.

Good news — an Australian parliamentary review recommends a more “expansive” media presence in the Pacific.

Bad news — little of that expansion envisions a role for island media.

Instead, the committee endorsed a proposal for “consultation” and the establishment of an independent “platform neutral” media corporation, versus the existing “broadcasting” organisation.

• READ MORE: Televising Australian soft power in the Pacific
• Beijing pushes Pacific media to use China content, ABC boss says
• Media freedom defenders criticise China, other Pacific information threats
• How China is manipulating the information war in the Pacific

That proposal was among several points raised at two public hearings and nine written submissions as part of Australia’s “Pacific Step Up” programme, aimed at countering the growing regional influence of China.

Former long-time Pacific correspondent Sean Dorney last month told the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade that Australia was previously leading regional media spaces.

“But the vacant space that was left there when Australia Network disappeared, as people have said, has really been taken over by China,” he said.

“Throughout my time as the Pacific correspondent for the ABC, I saw this Chinese influence growing everywhere.”

Local media delivery
Dorney suggested local media ought to deliver news content in any future media expansion.

“I’ll just end off by saying that, if we did boost broadcasting again, it does require greater collaboration.

“There are excellent journalists out there in the Pacific that we could work with to create content for both of us. It’s our region, and I think we should embrace it.”

Similar points were made by Free TV Australia.

“Key to the success of the PacificAus TV initiative has been Free TV’s ability to work with our Pacific broadcast partners to ensure that the programming made available meets the needs of the Pacific communities.”

However recommendations for local staff were not picked up in the final findings of the standing committee.

Only “consultation” was called for.

Relatively comprehensive
Taking up ten of 176 pages, the report’s media section is nonetheless seen as relatively comprehensive compared with the dismantling of broadcasting capacity in recent years.

This includes the literal dismantling of shortwave equipment in Australia despite wide protest from the Pacific region.

Nearly three years previously, a 2019 Pacific Media Summit heard that discontinuation of the shortwave service would save Australia some $2.8 million in power costs.

A suggestion from a delegate that that amount could be spent on $100,000 for reporters in each of 26 island states and territories was met with silence from ABC representatives at the summit.

However, funding would be dramatically expanded if the government takes up suggestions from the submissions to the joint committee.

Members of the Australia Asia Pacific Media Initiative (AAMPI) called for the “allocation of a total of $55-$75 million per year to ensure Australia has a fit-for-purpose, multi-platform media voice in the Asia Pacific region.”

Overall, submissions called for greater recognition of the media in “soft power” calculation.

Public diplomacy tool
AAPMI member Annmaree O’Keeffe said that “international broadcasting and its potency is not recognised at government level as a public diplomacy tool.”

Consultancy group Heriot Media and Governance cautioned against trying to use media as a policy messenger.

“A substantial body of research internationally supports the view that audiences are likely to invest greater trust in an international media service if they perceive it to be independent of political and other vested interests.”

Heriot also noted the loss of radio capacity, submitting that “shortwave [radio] had been the only almost uninterruptible signal when local media had been disabled by natural events or political actions.”

ABC told the inquiry that around 830,000 Pacific Islanders access their various platforms each month.

Off-platform, there were 1.6 million views of ABC content via social media such as YouTube.

Jason Brown is a long-time Pacific reporter based in Aotearoa New Zealand and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report.

“Not a great week for journalism at the ABC”, News Corp’s Sharri Markson tweeted earlier this month, when the week was barely a day old.

It is hard to remember the last time a News Corp columnist declared it was a great week for journalism at the ABC. Markson’s tweet linked to a story in The Australian that quoted former Attorney-General Christian Porter saying his dropping of his defamation claim against the ABC was “a humiliating backdown by the ABC”.

Apart from reporting the settlement, the main basis for the article was that the ABC had warned its staff not to claim victory following Porter’s withdrawal, and to be careful in the way they talked about it.

• READ MORE: View from The Hill: Porter decides it’s time to ‘fold em’ in ABC defamation case
• Latest $84 million cuts rip the heart out of the ABC, and our democracy
• Conspiracy theories on the right, cancel culture on the left: how political legitimacy came under threat in 2020

At such a legally sensitive moment, one might have thought the ABC warning to staff was mere prudence, but it also points to more recurring issues about how media organisations view their journalists’ statements on social media. These issues are likely to become more common, not less.

The right to tweet?
The Sydney Morning Herald recently published a story quoting Liberal Senator and former ABC journalist Sarah Henderson saying the national broadcaster’s social media policy was “woefully inadequate”.

There are genuine dilemmas here. Journalists as professionals and employees are subject to certain disciplines. What they tweet can and will affect the way others perceive their work.

Conversely, as citizens, they also have the right to free expression.

In April, The Australian’s economics editor, Adam Creighton, sent this tweet:

Covid19 has killed free speech. Covid19 will be the most formative event of my life.
Virtue signalling dominates truth.
The West is finished.

— Adam Creighton (@Adam_Creighton) April 11, 2021

Does such a cri de coeur affect how readers regard his judgement and capacity to report? Or should he have the right to say how he feels?

What constitutes crossing the line?
The ABC is the Australian media organisation that has most earnestly sought to resolve these dilemmas. It has four eminently sensible guidelines:

• do not mix the professional and the personal in ways likely to bring the ABC into disrepute
• do not undermine your effectiveness at work
• do not imply ABC endorsement of your personal views
• do not disclose confidential information obtained through work.

Henderson pointed to two breaches of these guidelines. One was from an ABC lawyer who called the Coalition government “fascist” and Prime Minister Scott Morrison “an awful human being” on Twitter, and then resigned. Henderson said he should not have been allowed to resign, but should have been fired.

Her other example involved what she called “Laura Tingle’s trolling of a prime minister” last year. This is an inaccurate use of the word trolling, but increasingly politicians (and journalists) seem to equate any criticism of themselves on social media as trolling.

Tingle’s single offending tweet concluded “we grieve the loss of so many of our fine colleagues to government ideological bastardry. Hope you are feeling smug Scott Morrison”. The tweet was posted late at night after a farewell function for her friend and colleague Philippa McDonald, and it was deleted the next morning.

It is asking a lot of ABC journalists to feel detached and impartial about government cutbacks to their own organisation that adversely affect the careers of their colleagues. Nevertheless, the ABC has a large investment in Tingle’s public credibility, and the tweet was immediately addressed internally.

ABC managing director David Anderson injected an unusual note of common sense when he was asked whether Tingle was reprimanded during a Senate estimates hearing. He called Tingle’s tweet “an error of judgement” and said “there’s a proportionality that needs to be applied”.

ABC boss David Anderson says rural and regional jobs have been ring fenced from the current cuts. As of last week about 70 ABC staff whose roles are gone are yet to depart the public broadcaster. Everyone leaving knows their job is gone. #estimates

— Tom McIlroy (@TomMcIlroy) October 21, 2020

The dangers of an unduly restrictive approach
The larger danger is that journalists, especially those at the ABC, will get caught up in public controversies surrounding their own work. While at one level they clearly should have the right to defend themselves, the problem is the temptation to succumb to the cheap point-scoring in which critics often engage, to be dragged down from the professional standards of the original programme.

Though recent public controversies have focused on apparent breaches on social media not being sufficiently punished, there are also dangers and potential injustices in an unduly restrictive approach.

The most obvious victim of a journalist being punished for social media activity was SBS football commentator Scott McIntyre, who posted a series of tweets on ANZAC Day in 2015 about the “cultification of an imperialist invasion”.

Then-Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull thought they were “despicable remarks which deserve to be condemned”, and contacted the head of SBS, Michael Ebeid. Ebeid fired McIntyre the same day.

Malcolm Turnbull denies influence over SBS decision to sack Scott McIntyre over controversial Anzac tweets. http://t.co/tzxHMBkCrD

— The Sydney Morning Herald (@smh) April 27, 2015

Human Rights Commissioner Tim Wilson was then quoted as saying McIntyre’s freedom of speech was not being curtailed, and that his historical claims “will be judged very harshly”.

Whatever the merits of his ANZAC tweets, they had no relationship to his role as a football commentator. Is his reporting on soccer compromised by his views on the ANZAC tradition?

This episode illustrates that “political correctness” and “cancel culture” are found across the political spectrum — and media organisations will continue to grapple with these issues as the social media profiles of their journalists continue to grow.

Dr Rodney Tiffen, is emeritus professor in the Department of Government and International Relations, University of Sydney. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

By ABC News Indepth

Just north of Australia a secret war is being fought. West Papuan independence fighters and Indonesian security forces are involved in a protracted and bloody battle over the issue of Papuan independence.

The conflict escalated after young West Papuan fighters killed Indonesian road workers building a highway into Papua’s central highlands.

The Indonesia government hit back hard, deploying hundreds of police and military who attacked the region in an effort to root out the rebels.

READ MORE: The battle for West Papuan independence from Indonesia has intensified with deadly results

Last year mass protests broke out, with civil resistance leaders from in and outside West Papua calling for freedom from Indonesia.

With foreign media largely shut out, the story of this unfolding humanitarian disaster remains untold. Hundreds have died and local officials estimate that over 40,000 people have been displaced.

There are allegations of torture and human rights abuses.

ABC Foreign Correspondent has been able to report from inside the conflict zone, gaining access to exclusive pictures of the recent unrest and speaking to eyewitnesses of the violence.

“I have to yell out to the world…because if I don’t, we’re going to be weaker and the indigenous people will be wiped out.” says one West Papuan highlander who is looking after children orphaned in the recent fighting.

“We will not retreat. We will not run. We will fight until recognition dawns,” says a member of West Papua’s young guerrilla force whose ranks include teenagers orphaned in the ongoing conflict.

“Dialogue is needed but dialogue which is constructive”, says Indonesia’s former Security Minister.

Sally Sara, with Victor Mambor, reports on a war with no end in sight.

The ABC’s decision today to end the appeal process against the warrant used to raid its offices demonstrates that the system is broken, says the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA).

The union says the only way to fix this is to change the law to protect public interest journalism and whistleblowers.

MEAA media federal president Marcus Strom said: “That warrant targeted journalists who had published the truth.

READ MORE: The Afghan Files – Defence leak exposes deadly secrets

“The warrant was issued with the intent to bypass the journalists’ ethical obligation to never reveal the identity of a confidential source – a principle of journalism recognised around the world.

“Journalists and whistleblowers cannot feel safe until there are legislative reforms to protect public interest journalism.

“Remember, there are three journalists still in legal limbo following the raids on the ABC and the home of a News Corporation journalist.

“This is not about making journalists above the law, but to bring the law into line with community expectations. There must be a positive legal protection for journalism that is in the public interest in order to uphold the public’s right to know.”

‘Scope of warrant disturbing’
Strom added: “The scope of the warrant is extremely disturbing. It allowed the AFP to ‘add, copy, delete or alter’ material in the ABC’s computers. That represents a genuine threat to the ability of media outlets to carry out their duties if government agencies can cause immense disruption to entire computer networks as well as undermine the privacy of other Australians unrelated to the warrant’s intent.

“The warrant was approved by a local court registrar in Queanbeyan. But it is clear that there needs to be greater oversight of these warrants.”

“As ABC managing director David Anderson has said today, the journalism in the Afghan Files was published almost two years before the raid. Its veracity has never been questioned.

“And yet for publishing the truth and upholding the public’s right to know, three journalists now face lengthy jail terms. Warrants should be contestable before they unleash their damage on the truth and the public’s right to know.”

The Department of Home Affairs and the AFP have made a supplementary submission to a Parliamentary inquiry into the freedom of the press that rejects the notion of contestable warrants, claiming contestability had the “potential [to] undermine the efficacy of such a warrant”.

Strom said: “That argument is a nonsense. The potential for overreach has already been acknowledged by the Department.

“On August 9 last year, Minister Dutton directed the AFP ‘to take into account the importance of a free and open press in Australia’s democratic society and to consider broader public interest implications before undertaking investigative action involving a professional journalist or news media organisation’.

‘Reforming bad law’
“Contestability is clearly necessary to stem overreach by government departments and the AFP.

MEAA chief executive Paul Murphy added: “The ability to contest warrants is not about placing journalists above the law. It is about reforming bad law.

“Since the September 11 attacks in 2001, the Australian Parliament has passed at least 75 national security laws. Under the guise of protecting the nation, many of those laws have introduced new penalties that criminalise journalists and their journalism, and persecute and punish whistleblowers for exposing wrongdoing.

“The public’s right to know what our government’s do in our name must not be allowed to be usurped by bad laws that punish the truth,” Murphy said.

A Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) media release.

• Other ABC raid stories

An Australian federal court decision upholding the legality of the police raid on the Sydney headquarters of the national public broadcaster ABC last June has dealt a major blow to the protection of journalists’ sources and poses a grave danger for the future of public interest journalism, says Reporters Without Borders (RSF).

In its ruling issued on February 17, the court rejected the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s challenge to the legality of the search warrant that allowed federal police to search computers, emails and USB sticks at its headquarters on 5 June 2019.

The police were trying to identify the source for The Afghan Files reporting by ABC journalists Sam Clark and Dan Oakes in 2017 about the role of Australian special forces in the illegal killing of civilians in Afghanistan.

READ MORE: The Afghan Files: Defence leak exposes deadly secrets of Australia’s special forces

The reporters used material provided by a whistleblower within the Defence Ministry.

“If confirmed on appeal, this federal court ruling will set a disturbing legal precedent by turning investigative reporters and whistleblowers into criminals,” said Daniel Bastard, the head of RSF’s Asia-Pacific desk.

“The ABC story never compromised national security and clearly served the interests of the Australian public, who have a right to reliable and independent information freely reported by journalists.

“We call on the federal judges to guarantee this right on appeal by recognising the search warrant’s illegality.”

Ruling fraught with consequences
Under the warrant, the police were authorised to search for evidence that the two journalists had “unlawfully obtained military information” and “dishonestly received stolen property”.

The supposedly stolen property was the leaked documents that exposed the illegal killings reported in The Afghan Files.

The federal police raid on ABC was all the more shocking for coming just one day after a raid on News Corp political editor Annika Smethurst’s home in Canberra. The timing of the two raids was widely seen as a deliberate attempt to intimidate investigative journalists.

The judicial precedents set by these two cases are particularly fraught with consequences inasmuch as Australia’s constitutional law contains no guarantees for press freedom.

• Australia is ranked 21st out of 180 countries in RSF’s 2019 World Press Freedom Index.

About 250 West Papuans have been served notices of eviction to leave their settlement in Port Moresby, reports The National.

National Capital District Commission officials, escorted by police officers, handed the settlers demolition orders last Thursday and told them to leave their home in the suburb of Rainbow where they had lived for 11 years.

Communal leader Elly Wangai said that some of them were now PNG citizens after former Prime Minister Peter O’Neill allowed them to gain citizenship without paying the K10,000 application fee.

READ MORE: West Papuan refugees ordered to demolish houses – Pacific Beat

“But unlike other PNG citizens, we don’t have any land to go to. When we were given citizenship, the government did not give us land to settle. And this is the fifth time we have been evicted since 2007.

“We were first evicted from 8-Mile settlement and we settled outside the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) Office at Ela Beach.

“Then we moved to the Boroko Police station. Then to Apex Park at Boroko and now to here.”

Wangai said they were willing to move from the settlement.

‘Drainage area’
“This is a drainage area and we know that and we will move. But we want NCDC to provide land for us.

“If NCDC can evict other PNG settlements from 2-Mile and resettle them at 6-Mile, they should do the same for us.”

Wangai said they had once been given land at Red Hills in the suburb of Gerehu.

“But when we went there, developments were already taking place.

“So we had to return here. Since we were given eviction notices, our children were traumatised and did not attend school.

“Our mothers who are involved in small economical activities like selling doughnuts and ice blocks have stopped.

“They are finding it hard to earn money to look after their family. If we are given land to move, we will be confident to live our daily lives.”

According to ABC, Port Moresby Governor Powes Parkop was unaware of the move to serve the demolition orders or what had prompted it.

A vocal supporter of the West Papua cause, Parkop said he would work to stop – or at least stall – the process to carry out the demolition orders, and fulfill his promise to find the settlers a permanent home.

“I hope I can sort it out soon and get proper allocation of the land so they’ve got security and can build a future.”

I joined the Australian Journalists Association (now the MEAA – Media Alliance) in, I think, 1971, when I still lived and worked in Papua New Guinea.

When I formally retired from paid work a few years back, I was given honorary membership but, to bolster the journalism profession and its union, I recently asked to return as a paying member – which was accepted.

Given that I still scribble the PNG Attitude blog, book reviews for The Australian, a column in Noosa Style and other bits and pieces, that seemed appropriate.

READ MORE: Journalists call for legislation to protect press freedom and the public’s right to know

It may seem implausible, but freedom of the press is under attack in our country. The actions of federal authorities have been nibbling at that freedom for some time, and most recently the federal police took a large bite at it.

I’m concerned. That’s why I’m sharing this letter:

A GRAVE THREAT TO MEDIA FREEDOM

Dear Llew O’Brien, MP,
cc Prime Minister Scott Morrison,
Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese

I support in full the following letter from the MEAA calling upon the Australian Parliament to act to guarantee the freedom of the press in Australia.

Recent events have shown that this implied right of Australians is under threat. Legislative and constitutional changes are required:

The Australian Federal Police raids on the home of News Corp Australia journalist Annika Smethurst and on the offices of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) represent a grave threat to press freedom in Australia.

We welcome the Prime Minister’s stated commitment to freedom of the press and openness to discuss the concerns that have been raised.

A healthy democracy cannot function without its media being free to bring to light uncomfortable truths, to scrutinise the powerful and inform our communities. Investigative journalism cannot survive without the courage of whistleblowers, motivated by concern for their fellow citizens, who seek to bring to light instances of wrongdoing, illegal activities, fraud, corruption and threats to public health and safety.

These are issues of public interest, of the public’s right to know. Whistleblowers and the journalists who work with them are entitled to protection, not prosecution. Truth-telling is being punished.

The raids, a raft of recent national security laws, and the prosecutions of whistleblowers Richard Boyle, David McBride and Witness K all demonstrate the public’s right to know is being harmed. Truth-telling is being punished.

It is also clear from the global response to the recent raids that Australia’s proud reputation around the world as a free and open society is under threat.

We urge Parliament to legislate changes to the law to recognise and enshrine a positive public interest protection for whistleblowers and for journalists. Without these protections Australians will be denied important information it is their right as citizens to have.

We urge you to take prompt action to protect our democracy for all Australians.

Yours sincerely,
Keith Jackson AM

• Australia’s press freedom needs more protection: Here’s where to start
• More Australian media raids stories
• Press freedom demonstrators say: ‘Australian democracy is in grave danger’

By Democracy Now!

Press freedom groups are sounding the alarm over a pair of police raids on journalists. Last week, Australian Federal Police swept into the headquarters of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in Sydney, reviewing thousands of documents for information about a 2017 report The Afghan Files that found Australian special forces soldiers may have committed war crimes in Afghanistan.

The raid came on Wednesday, one day after police in Melbourne raided the home of Annika Smethurst, a reporter with the Herald Sun newspaper.

Democracy Now! speaks to Australian journalism professor Joseph Fernandez – correspondent of Reporters Without Borders and Pacific Journalism Review – and Peter Greste, founding director of the Brisbane-based Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom.

Greste was imprisoned for 400 days in 2013 to 2014 while covering the political crisis in Egypt.

READ MORE: Asia Pacific Report stories on the police ABC raids

Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Press freedom groups in Australia are sounding the alarm over a pair of police raids on journalists. On Wednesday last week, Australian Federal Police swept into the headquarters of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in Sydney, reviewing thousands of documents for information about a 2017 report that found Australian special forces may have committed war crimes in Afghanistan.

ABC investigations executive editor John Lyons spoke on his own network just minutes after police served a warrant naming a news director and the two reporters who broke the story.

JOHN LYONS: They have downloaded 9,214 documents. I counted them. And they are now going through them. They’ve set up a huge screen, and they’re going through, email by email. It’s quite extraordinary.

And I feel—as a journalist, I feel it’s a real violation, because these are emails between this particular journalist and his boss, her boss, its drafts, its scripts of stories.

I’ve never seen an assault on the media as savage as this one we’re seeing today at the ABC. … And the chilling message is not so much for the journalists, but it’s also for the public.

AMY GOODMAN: Wednesday’s raid on the ABC came one day after police in Melbourne raided the home of Annika Smethurst, a reporter with the Herald Sun newspaper. Police served a warrant related to Smethurst’s reporting on a secret effort by an Australian intelligence service to expand its surveillance capabilities, including against Australian nationals.

Australia’s acting Federal Police Commissioner Neil Gaughan defended the raids, saying journalists could face prison time for holding classified information.

COMMISSIONER NEIL GAUGHAN: No sector of the community should be immune for this type of activity or evidence collection, more broadly. This includes law enforcement itself, the media or, indeed, even politicians.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, for more, we’re joined by two guests in Australia. With us from Brisbane is Peter Greste. He is the UNESCO chair in journalism and communications at University of Queensland. He is founding director of Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom.

He was imprisoned for over a year, for 400 days, in 2013 to 2014, while covering the political crisis in Egypt.

And joining us from Perth, Australia, Professor Joseph Fernandez is with us, a media law academic at Curtin University, Australia’s correspondent for Reporters Without Borders.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Joseph Fernandez, let’s begin with you. Lay out exactly what happened and when it took place, all the details as you know them, both the raiding of ABC and the journalist’s home.

At her home, the Australian Federal Police spent seven-and-a-half hours going through every nook and cranny of her belongings, including the rubbish bin outside the house. And they sought to access her email messages, phone messages and anything they could lay their hands on, including what she might have kept away in her undies drawer.

Annika obviously was very traumatised by this, but she has held her head up high, in the knowledge that the story about which she was being investigated was really something very arguably and very strongly in the public interest or of legitimate public concern.

The second raid, the following day …

AMY GOODMAN: And that story was?

JOSEPH FERNANDEZ: Sorry. Can you say that again, please?

AMY GOODMAN: And that story was, Joseph?

JOSEPH FERNANDEZ: The story was that there was a discussion, a discussion about a plan to expand state surveillance, that would have possibly included surveillance of ordinary citizens. And this was quite an unprecedented idea.

And the objective of such a plan was obviously going to be justified on the premise of protecting national security.

The second raid happened at the headquarters of the national broadcaster ABC, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, in Sydney. And police officers entered the premises armed with a warrant with an exhaustive inventory of things that they were looking for.

And as you have noted, they scoured hundreds and thousands of documents and materials, and left with a small collection of materials in a sealed package, with the agreement not to use them until a possible challenge is considered in the days ahead.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Joseph Fernandez, these raids coming within a day of each other, was there any coordination, or were these related in any way?

JOSEPH FERNANDEZ: That’s an interesting question. One of the first questions that sprung into people’s minds was whether they were related, whether this was instigated by the government. The prime minister quickly moved to distance himself and his government from the raids, claiming that the two agencies and the police were acting entirely of their own accord.

And the police themselves are on record as saying that the two events are unrelated. And so, it’s left to be seen, you know, whether new light will be shed on the real circumstances that led to these raids. It’s quite hard to accept, without inquiry as to whether there was absolutely no notice given, whether informally or formally, to the bosses in government.

AMY GOODMAN: And for people to understand, I mean, the ABC is the leading broadcaster throughout Australia. I wanted to bring Peter Greste into this conversation. We had you here in our studio after you were imprisoned for well over for year by Egypt with your two Al Jazeera colleagues.

You were working with Al Jazeera at the time. You certainly knew what it meant to be arrested, to not have rights, not to be even told at the beginning why the Egyptian authorities were holding you. Now you see the situation in Australia.

And I was wondering if you can talk about the laws around press freedom, if you have them in Australia. Amazingly, in this warrant, the warrant gave the police wide-ranging authority to view, seize, edit and destroy virtually any document it saw fit.

PETER GRESTE: Yeah, that’s right. Look, there are a whole host of questions in there, Amy, but let me deal with the very beginning of it, and that’s the way I felt when I heard about the news, because it did—I mean, even now I can feel my skin pricking up, thinking about the raids and what that would have felt like, because I know exactly what it was like to have agents burst into your room looking for evidence, and all of the confusion that surrounds that, the outrage that surrounds that.

But I never really honestly expected to see it take place here in Australia. And it seems to me that even though I’m not suggesting Australia is about to become an authoritarian state like Egypt anytime soon, I think that we are being pushed in the same direction by the same kind of imperatives around national security, the prioritising of national security over the human rights and democratic rights of citizens, largely because it’s much easier to make the political case for national security legislation, particularly when you see attacks in the streets and the consequences of that, but much harder to make the more abstract case for human rights and citizens’ rights, freedom of speech, freedom of the press and so on, until you see what that means in practical terms.

And that’s what we saw last week with these two raids. I think it’s very, very concerning to me, and I’m deeply worried.

Now, as you mentioned, we don’t have in Australia any explicit protection for press freedom written into the law, nothing about freedom of speech. Australia has no bill of rights. All we have is an implied right of political communications, that the High Court decided that was there as a function of our democracy.

They said that we live in a representative democracy, and you can’t have an effective representative democracy without political communication, therefore, that right is somehow inferred in the Constitution.

But without anything like the First Amendment in the United States here in Australia, without any explicit protection for press freedom, what we’re seeing is a lot of scope for our legislators to draft laws that really intrude on press freedom in all sorts of deeply troubling ways that make it much harder for journalists to protect their sources, make it much harder even for journalists to contact sources within government.

And so, what we’re seeing is a vast web of interconnected national security laws that, in all sorts of ways, make these kinds of raids that we saw last week possible.

I’m not so critical of the Federal Police for carrying out the raids. I accept that they were probably doing their jobs. And as we’ve been hearing, there may well have been some kind of political involvement in there.

But let’s take what the Federal Police have been saying at face value, that there was nothing political. If there was nothing political, if they were simply fulfilling their duties under the law, then, clearly, the law needs to change. And that’s what we need to start talking about.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Peter Greste, we have about a minute left, but I wanted to ask you, in terms of—who determines the violations of state secrets? Is there one centralised agency, or can various federal agencies decide to conduct these kinds of raids in Australia?

PETER GRESTE: No. Look, it’s quite difficult to know quite how the laws come into effect or come into force. I mean, let’s take a look at the data retention laws, the metadata. In any number of more than 20 agencies, government agencies can look into any Australian’s metadata without a warrant.

Now, they need to apply for a special journalist warrant if they want to investigate journalists’ metadata in a search for sources, but, otherwise, there is no—there is no warrant system. They can look anywhere, anywhere that they want.

And I think that’s the kind of scope that we’re talking about. That’s overreach. You talk to any lawyer, any civil rights activist, anyone who knows about the way the law operates, and they’ll acknowledge that that’s overreach. And we need to really start a vigorous conversation within this country about the limits of state power and the kind of ways that we need to encourage and support press freedom, and also the protection of whistleblowers, because, ultimately, these raids were in the hunt for the sources of these stories, for the journalists’ sources, for the whistleblowers that felt that these stories needed to be told.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we have to wrap up right now, but we want to continue the vigorous discussion, and we’re going to bring folks Part 2 at democracynow.org under web exclusives.

Peter Greste, we want to thank you, UNESCO chair in journalism and communications, University of Queensland, founding director of the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom, imprisoned for more than 400 days.

Also, Joseph Fernandez, a media law academic at Curtin University, Australia’s correspondent for Reporters Without Borders. Stay with us. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

• This Democracy Now! transcript is republished under a Creative Commons licence.
• The Afghan Files: Defence leak exposes deadly secrets of Australia’s special forces

As I stood out the front of the ABC’s Sydney headquarters on Wednesday morning (June 5), I couldn’t help but feel the conflicting senses of both pride and anxiety.

Just moments earlier, a group of first-year UTS Journalism students, including myself, had raced from our lecture upon learning that the Australian Federal Police (AFP) were conducting a raid of the ABC building next door. It was over the 2017 story The Afghan Files.

We waited with perched phones in the middle of an eager scrum of professional journalists from organisations such as Sky News, Channel 9, Channel 7 and Reuters News.

READ MORE: The Afghan Files – Defence leak exposes deadly secrets of Australian special forces

We took photographs and short videos before posting them to our Twitter accounts and watching as audience responses flooded in.

It wasn’t until I saw the comments from international news organisations requesting to use my footage, that I understood the significance of where I was, and what I was doing.

I checked my tweet engagement and interaction statistics and realised that people were following my posts for breaking information.

Hi Allie, I’m a journalist with Storyful News. OK to clear this for use in broadcast/online news with attribution to you and UTS News? Thanks! Details: https://t.co/FDYxmeYB08

— StoryfulNews (@StoryfulNews) June 5, 2019

I was at the scene and, to the best of my ability, I was responsible for letting the world know the truth and facts of the events that were unfolding.

Feeling accomplished and alive
It was the first time that I had been in such a position. Indeed, it was the first time that I had felt what it is like to be a journalist. And to tell you the truth, I had never felt so accomplished and alive.

The videos of fellow journalism students were also picked up by top news organisations. For instance, a video of ABC News director Gaven Morris, shot by Nicholas Rupolo, was reposted by The Australian and news.com.au.

RELATED STORY: AFP Raids: ‘Journalism is not a crime’ says ABC News boss

Through to the afternoon, I was constantly refreshing my feed to check for updates from the ABC’s Head of Investigative Journalism, John Lyons, who was live tweeting from inside the ABC building. He was sharing information on what the AFP officers were searching for, as they rummaged through 9214 files that belonged to the ABC, and were considered of interest in their investigation.

It may sound melodramatic, but my heart became heavy when Lyons posted two photographs of the search warrant that the police had obtained. I was truly astounded by the scope and broadness of what information the AFP had the power to search and seize.

I thought back to how I had felt earlier that day; the immense zest I’d felt for journalism had now been replaced with a fear for it’s future.

I was confronted with the true irony of the fact that I was reporting freely on an investigation that epitomised the gradual restrictions on my chosen career.

Using this as my incentive, I continued to follow the raid as it stretched into the night.

By 7:30pm, there were six journalists and photographers, seven including myself, who remained out the front of the ABC building.

Keeping an eye out
We chatted among ourselves while keeping an eye out for any movements or updates on the raid. Lyons then tweeted photographs of the AFP filling out paperwork. He approximated that the raid would be concluding in 45 minutes.

At 8:14pm, one of the photographers sighted the AFP officers walking through the security gates of the ABC building.

“Get your cameras ready!,” he yelled.

Remembering the tips and tricks that I had learnt about shooting videos on a mobile phone, I captured the AFP as they made a swift exit from the building across Harris Street, taking with them bags that were filled with what we can only assume to be evidence.

I returned to the ABC building along with the other journalists and photographers. We sat and looked through the photographs and videos that we’d been able to get, and in doing so, I was relieved.

Admittedly, it’s a strange emotion to have felt. But I was relieved by the determination of those who I’d waited with. For over eight hours, some without a break, they had stayed to break the news that the raid had finally ended.

Their sheer perseverance gave me hope in the otherwise grim future of journalism.

Scrolled through Twitter
When I went home, I scrolled through Twitter and noticed another post from Lyons.

“Bravo to this country’s media for taking on the government over the new war on the media”, he said.

“I’ve never seen such a united front. Old rivalries put aside. Journalism matters”.

I owe a great deal of gratitude to Lyons and the other news organisations who showed their support for journalism in the wake of the ABC raid.

It is comforting to know that, as long as people continue to fight for its freedom, journalism will survive.

Befitting what Wednesday’s events taught me – and as quoted by former Washington Post president and publisher Philip L. Graham – “Journalism is the first rough draft of history”.

Alexandra Menzies is a first year journalism student at the University of Technology Sydney with a passion for politics and human rights. This article was first published by the UTS Central News journalism lab

Two raids by the Australian Federal Police (AFP) on journalists and media organisations within the last 24 hours represent a disturbing attempt to intimidate legitimate news journalism that is in the public interest, says the union for Australian journalists, the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA).

Yesterday’s raid on a News Corporation Australia journalist, and today’s raid on the public broadcaster ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) and three of its journalists, suggest that no media organisation is immune from government attacks on press freedom.

“A second day of raids by the AFP sets a disturbing pattern of assaults on Australian press freedom. This is nothing short of an attack on the public’s right to know,” said MEAA media section president Marcus Strom in a statement.

READ MORE: ABC’s Sydney headquarters raided by Australian Federal Police over Afghan Files stories

WATCH: John Lyons of the ABC’s The Drum sums up the Australian Federal Police raid

“Police raiding journalists is becoming normalised and it has to stop.

“These raids are about intimidating journalists and media organisations because of their truth-telling.

“They are about more than hunting down whistleblowers that reveal what governments are secretly doing in our name, but also preventing the media from shining a light on the actions of government,” Strom said.

“It is equally clear that the spate of national security laws passed by the Parliament over the past six years have been designed not just to combat terrorism but to persecute and prosecute whistleblowers who seek to expose wrongdoing.

‘Poisonous laws’
“These laws seek to muzzle the media and criminalise legitimate journalism. They seek to punish those that tell Australians the truth.

“Yesterday’s raid was in response to a story published a year ago. Today’s raid comes after a story was published nearly two years ago.

“Suddenly, just days after a federal election, the Federal Police launches this attack on press freedom. It seems that when the truth embarrasses the government, the result is the Federal Police will come knocking at your door,” Strom said.

“MEAA demands to know who is responsible for ordering these coordinated raids, and why now. We call for the government and opposition to take collective responsibility for the legal framework they’ve created that is allowing for what appears to be politically motivated assault on press freedom,” Strom said.

“For years the Liberal and Labor parties have engaged in a high-stakes game of bluff which has seen the introduction of anti-democratic laws in the guise of national security legislation.

“It is time that the government and opposition had a common sense approach to defusing these poisonous laws that are effectively criminalising journalism. This attack on the truth must end.”

• The Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) is the Australian union defending press freedoms and is a member of the International Federation of Journalists.
• More media freedom stories

It is both apt and overdue that veteran ABC correspondent Sean Dorney was last night awarded the Outstanding Contribution to Journalism at the 2018 Walkley ceremonies.

Judged by the trustees of the Walkley Foundation, this award not only recognises Dorney’s extraordinary body of work built over four decades chronicling life and politics in the Pacific, especially Papua New Guinea, but pays homage to one of the last of a near extinct breed of old-time expat Pacific correspondents who lived and breathed their rounds as long-term residents of the communities upon which they were reporting.

Australian newsrooms, instead of panting and pontificating about the growing influence of China, might be better served by tapping into Pacific conversations.

READ MORE: Podcast by Bond academic, student wins Walkley Award for journalism excellence

Sprung from the bad-old and arrogant days of colonial dispatches referencing “restless natives” and “strange customs” when first nation’s peoples served merely as the backdrop for the white man’s conquering and efforts to “civilise”, it can be argued that for a time these rusted-on corros (who not infrequently through their marriages, gained the privilege of the unique insight of living life within a Pacific family), served as useful intermediary interlocutors in the transitional societies of post-independent Pacific states.

As nations such as PNG, Fiji, Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu fought to different degrees to shake off their colonial framing and fashion a culture of accountability of their own, correspondents like myself and Dorney strove to facilitate and amplify indigenous views of events in these nations. This was both in our reporting for Australian audiences, or, in Dorney’s case, for the entire region. His reports were broadcast back into the countries he covered by Radio Australia, the ABC’s once wonderful but now defunct shortwave radio service.

Reporting crises
With the additional resources afforded our first-world news bureaus, it was not uncommon in the two decades either side of the turn of the century for Pacific correspondents to report on unfolding events such as the Bougainville secession crisis or expose corrupt or inept governance that indigenous journalists literally couldn’t afford to do.

As late as 2003, my “scoop” as The Australian’s South Pacific correspondent on the Howard government’s decision to dispatch a 2000-strong Australian-led Pacific intervention force to restore the rule of law in Solomon Islands after several years of unrest, was lifted by the national newspaper, The Solomon Star to run as their frontpage splash.

The only difference being that, unlike The Solomon Star’s newsroom, I worked for a media outlet that could bear the exorbitant cost of international phone calls; I had the means to contact Solomon Island government officials to confirm the story after their meetings in Canberra.

Much has been written in the past decade or so warning about the dangers of the disappearing resident Pacific correspondent, as first Australian Associated Press, then Fairfax closed their bureaus in Suva, Port Moresby, and Honiara, and in many cases wound down the network of stringers who reported for them elsewhere in the region.

The ABC is now the only Australian media outlet still maintaining a permanent presence in the South Pacific region with its bureau in Port Moresby.

But as we are all learning, with disruption comes new opportunities and with digital disruption, in particular, has come new ways of gathering, reporting, and disseminating news.

Hear from the people
Here’s the rub: should we really be lamenting the passing of the old-fashioned foreign correspondent, particularly in our own region?

Or is this a chance to embrace the opportunity to hear from the people of the Pacific in their own voices with analysis from their perspectives and news priorities that reflect Pacific agendas?

There is today a prolific cohort of indigenous journos, bloggers, and social commentators already daily reporting, dissecting, and disseminating their nations and region’s affairs with the insight only an indigenous member of an indigenous society can have.

Australian and New Zealand newsrooms, instead of panting and pontificating about the growing influence of China, might be better served tapping into these conversations.

If we joined them, we might even learn a thing or two about the nations and the region within which we live.

Mary-Louise O’Callaghan lived and reported on the Pacific as a foreign correspondent with Australian metropolitan daily newspapers for more than two decades. In 1997 she won the Gold Walkley for Excellence in Journalism for her investigative reporting exposing the Papua New Guinean government’s ill-conceived decision to hire foreign mercenaries to end a war for secession on the island of Bougainville. Her book Enemies Within, Australia, PNG and the Sandline Mercenary Affair, was published the following year. She is now working for World Vision Australia where she leads the Public Affairs team. This article is republished from the Lowy Institute’s Interpreter with permission.

• Full list of the 2018 Walkley Awards

A public broadcasting advocacy group has condemned Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s plan to commercialise Pacific broadcasting as not being able to provide quality public interest journalism to the country’s neighbours.

Supporters of Australian Broadcasting in Asia and the Pacific, a group linked to ABC Friends, has asked Morrison to rethink his plans.

“If Mr Morrison wants to restore a fresh initiative like the Australia Network he is dependent on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation which has the experience and professionalism to create strong partnerships with Pacific nations,” the supporters statement said.

READ MORE: Morrison to unveil broad suite of measures to boost Australia’s influence in the Pacific

“The voice of Australia through Radio Australia, and more recently via a wider range of ABC media platforms, has long been valued by people in the Pacific and many ABC broadcasters have become popular in the region.”

Australian foreign policy would not be enhanced by the “commercial news judgements of Fox or Sky News”, which did not provide independent analysis of complex issues.

Professional broadcasting in the Pacific depended on “two-way respectful communication” that enhanced understanding of diverse perspectives in the region, the advocacy group said.

Clear expectations
In recent months Pacific leaders had made clear their expectations of Australian/Pacific public broadcasting:

• Vanuatu Prime Minister Charlot Salwal has called for rebuilding public interest broadcasting;
• In a speech to the Lowy Institute, Samoan Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sa’ilele Malielegaoi had called for the Pacific voice to be heard in Australia; and
• Other Pacific leaders had echoed this call, as well as Secretary-General of the South Pacific Forum.

“Significantly, if Australia were to accept this approach to Pacific broadcasting it would become the only nation to rely on the commercial sector to deliver its ‘soft power’ diplomacy.

“Just imagine Canada or Britain giving such a significant national task to commercial interests!” said the statement.

ABC Friends national president Margaret Reynolds urged Prime Minister Morrison to reconsider this public policy shift and take advice from the Department of Foreign Affairs which was more familiar with the needs of Pacific nations and managing diplomatic relations.

• Morrison reveals multi-billion-dollar infrastructure development bank for Pacific
• ABC Friends

The next managing director of the ABC must be prepared to fight for better funding and independence, and to champion public broadcasting in a hostile political environment, says the union representing the ABC’s editorial staff.

The Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance says the sacking of Michelle Guthrie follows a tumultuous period for the ABC.

MEAA members hope that new leadership, temporarily under David Anderson, could be a circuit breaker for the organisation, says the MEAA.

READ MORE: ‘I am devastated,’ says sacked boss as she considers legal options

The director of MEAA Media, Katelin McInerney, said Guthrie’s two-and-a-half years as managing director would unfortunately be remembered for historically low levels of funding culminating in the loss of $84 million in this year’s budget, hundreds of redundancies, unprecedented political attacks on the ABC’s independence and low staff morale.

“It is no secret the ABC is caught in the pincers – between the need to invest in an ever-changing media landscape, and a decline in real funding to historically low levels,” McInerney said.

“The next managing director of the ABC will face real challenges, including how to restore the trust and confidence of staff by ending the ‘Hunger Games’ processes, casualisation, and outsourcing which in four years have seen more than 1000 experienced workers leave the organisation,” she said.

“They must have a clear vision for the ABC and be able to articulate the direction they want to take the organisation.

“They must be a vocal public advocate for the ABC, who is prepared to tackle head-on the historically low levels of ABC funding with meaningful engagement with the Federal Government.

“They must be 100% committed to public broadcasting and to fend off any attempts to privatise the ABC either directly or by stealth.

“They must be a champion for quality Australian content and specialist content and a staunch defender of the ABC’s independence and of its editorial staff. This includes refocusing daily journalism away from lifestyle content and ‘clickbait’ and back towards news and current affairs.

“Importantly, the ABC board must also be prepared to back the staff of the ABC and the integrity of the ABC as a respected publicly-owned institution in the face of unrelenting political attacks.

“MEAA will shortly be writing to the incoming MD to seek positive engagement and consultation on the above issues, and hope to involve our members with an improved dialogue with management on the challenges the ABC faces.

“We feel it is time for a new vision and new direction for the ABC to emerge, allowing journalists and content makers to get on with the job of serving audiences with the content they trust.”

The ABC MEAA House Committee asked that external critics of the organisation pause to give the new leadership some time and space, to allow this dialogue to happen in good faith, the MEAA statement said.

• ABC boss Michelle Guthrie sacked by board

The elephant in the room about the Australian Broadcasting Corporation ban that has people tip-toeing through the frangipani and whispering in hushed tones is the Canberra’s asylum seeker detention centre in the small Pacific state of Nauru.

Nauru is the host of the Pacific Islands Forum leaders’ summit on September 3-6 and the ban on the ABC has been widely condemned by media freedom groups, including the Pacific Media Centre.

The Nauru detention centre has become a significant part of Nauru’s economy since 2001, and in the wake of the strip mining of phosphate (guano) which left it bereft of resources and finances.

READ MORE: NZ Pacific journalists ‘appalled’ by Nauru ban on ABC at Forum

“Nauru’s Australian-managed detention camp is a disgrace, just as the one on Manus island was (now closed). It shows the profound hypocrisy of both Australian and Nauruan authorities,” says Daniel Bastard, head of the Asia-Pacific Desk for Reporters with Borders (RSF).

“Canberra outsources its absurd anti-immigration policy and washes its dirty hands in paying huge amounts of money to Yaren which, in exchange, accepts to carry on human rights violations.

“For sure, Nauruan authorities don’t want journalists to investigate this issue, to report on the living or surviving conditions of the refugees and to interview the numerous men, women and children arbitrarily detained in the camp,” he told Asia Pacific Report.

“And the Australian government doesn’t want this hypocrisy to be exposed either, since Canberra is responsible for this matter.”

No illusion
Veteran New Zealand journalist Michael Field, who has covered the Pacific for three decades, is under no illusion why Nauru has banned the ABC and imposed restrictions on the accredited media that will be covering the Forum.

“It is hardly surprising given the way Nauru has been turned into an Australian concentration camp – Nauru and Australian authorities are desperate to avoid an independent view of it all,” says Field.

“Australia has treated Nauru as a colony long after independence. But the current Nauru government is strongly opinionated and has a deep sense of its own point of view.”

Associate Professor Joseph Fernandez, a media law specialist and academic at Curtin University, Western Australia, and an RSF correspondent, believes Canberra should use its influence to get Nauru to back down on its ban.

“This kind of attitude from governments towards the media should be checked and it should be done convincingly. After all, Australia does provide financial aid to Nauru,” Dr Fernandez says.

“It should use this as a leverage to ensure such governments do not behave in an unacceptable way especially when Australian interests are at stake.

“The Australian public are entitled to not have a representative from their public broadcaster denied permission to cover the event only on the grounds that the host government is not happy with the broadcaster’s previous coverage.”

Not surprised
He is not surprised by Canberra treading warily around the issue.

“It is disappointing that the Australian government has not been more active in opposing this ban, but it isn’t surprising because our leaders tend to take a ‘softly, softly’ approach,” Dr Fernandez says.

He does think that Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull should be a bit more vocal on ABC’s banning from a free media point-of-view, than washing its hands of the affair and claiming Nauru has “sovereign” rights.

“Yes, of course. Even though Nauru may be right to say that it should have the final say about who it grants an entry visa to, in the present case the grounds for such refusal are very flimsy and an affront to the notion of a free press,” says Dr Fernandez.

The ABC more than any other media organisation in the Pacific has arguably covered Nauru better than the rest, and by doing so has got under the thin veneer of democracy of Baron Waqa’s presidency.

“The ABC has a history of investigation in Nauru. In 2015, it investigated a bribery scandal of President Waqa by an Australian phosphate dealer,” RSF’s Bastard says.

Michael Field says: “I guess it is simply because the ABC has covered Nauru more than other news outlets.”

‘Fearless reporting’
Dr Fernandez explains: “The ABC is well regarded for its fearless reporting, not just in Australia but also on other countries.

“The ABC coverage of Nauru has been quite critical in the past and this is not something countries with less established democracies are comfortable with.

“Those in power sometimes allow that power to go to their heads. If the Nauruan government has a complaint about specific ABC reporting it should use the proper channels to take these complaints forward.

“The ABC has one of the most elaborate complaints mechanisms in the country. That aside, if something is legally actionable they should take action through the courts. After all, governments and their leaders are better placed to seek redress through the courts.”

Bastard bluntly states that the Nauruan government is authoritarian in its outlook.

“Nauruan authorities don’t have a strong history of promoting freedom to inform, especially since 2013. What with the US$8000 fee to apply for a visa (waived for the Forum), with no guarantee of approval, the blocking of Facebook for almost three years, increasing cases of blatant censorship on domestic media in the recent years…

“There is nothing to gain in acting like this if you want to build a long-term democracy. But if the current government wants to remain in power…?”

To boycott or not?
The news media appears divided on the proposed boycott of the Forum, as threatened by the Australian Federal Parliamentary Press Gallery president David Crowe last month.

Bastard agrees with the boycott: “Yes, absolutely,” he says.

“Media and journalists have to show solidarity with their colleagues. If a government doesn’t want to abide by democratic rules in letting the press do its work freely, then the press as a whole doesn’t have to abide by authoritarian decisions.”

But, says Field: “Journalists should report the news – not boycott it…. And if there are handicaps in that reporting, then tell the readers. Not run off into the corner and have a cry.”

News Corp in Australia has already rejected the boycott, and while the New Zealand Press Gallery sympathises with its Australian counterparts it will not be boycotting the Forum.

“We share the concerns expressed by our Australian counterparts in the Federal Parliamentary Press Gallery about the Nauru Government’s decision to ban the Australian Broadcasting Corporation from the Pacific Islands Forum,” says Stacey Kirk, chair of the NZ Parliamentary Press Gallery.

“There is no intention for the NZ Parliamentary Press Gallery to boycott the forum at this stage,” she told Asia Pacific Report.”

With only a matter of weeks to the Forum there is water to run under the bridge yet.

Sri Krishnamurthi is a journalist on the Postgraduate Diploma in Communication Studies (Digital Media) reporting on the Asia-Pacific Journalism course at AUT University.

• ABC still planning to go to Forum
• Protests gather force over Nauru ban on ABC
• Pacific Media Centre condemns ‘flagrant’ Nauru ban on ABC at Forum

Protests have been gathering force over the Nauru government ban on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) from entering the country to cover the Pacific Islands Forum Leaders’ Summit in September.

Nauru accused ABC, which is Australia’s public broadcaster, of biased and false reporting.

The summit is an annual gathering of Oceania’s heads of state, where important matters concerning the region are addressed.

READ MORE: Nauru government’s move against press freedom ‘disgraceful’

On July 2, 2018, the Nauru government issued a statement restricting the number of people who can attend the summit because of “very limited accommodation.” But it singled out ABC and explained why it banned the broadcaster:

…no representative from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation will be granted a visa to enter Nauru under any circumstances, due to this organisation’s blatant interference in Nauru’s domestic politics prior to the 2016 election, harassment of and lack of respect towards our President in Australia, false and defamatory allegations against members of our Government, and continued biased and false reporting about our country. It is our right, as it is the right of every nation, to choose who is allowed to enter.

ABC aired a documentary in 2016 alleging torture and child abuse linked to Australian government’s offshore asylum-seeker processing centers, which are managed by Nauru. It also published a report which alleged that Nauru’s president and some of his ministers received bribery from an Australian phosphate dealer.

Nauru condemned both reports as “racist” and “biased political propaganda”.

The small island nation was a mining site for several decades until phosphate deposits were exhausted in the 1980s. It received aid from Australia and hosted an Australian immigration detention facility.

ABC news director Gaven Morris criticised the decision of Nauru:

The Nauruan Government should not be allowed to dictate who fills the positions in an Australian media pool.

It can hardly claim it is “welcoming the media” if it dictates who that media will be and bans Australia’s public broadcaster.

The Nauru government quickly responded by describing the ABC statement as “arrogant, disrespectful and a further example of the sense of entitlement shown by this activist media organisation.” It added:

We remind the ABC that we – like Australia – have every right to refuse a visa to any person or organisation that we believe is not of good character, and that entry into our country is a privilege not a right. The Australian media do not decide who enters Nauru.

Australia’s Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said Nauru’s decision was “regrettable” but refused to intervene on behalf of ABC.

The Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance, an Australian network of media workers, said the government should pursue the issue with Nauru officials:

This is an attack on press freedom that our government needs to condemn in the strongest possible terms. Recognising the sovereignty of another nation does not extend to accepting they have the right to prevent free and open reporting.

Australia’s Federal Parliamentary Press Gallery threatened to boycott the event in Nauru:

If the ban is not reversed, the media pool will be disbanded. If one cannot go, none will go.

We oppose the Nauru edict because it is wrong in this instance and because it sets a dangerous precedent. What other Australians might be banned from a similar group by another government in future? We stand for a free press, not a banned one.

Red Ink of Australia’s Nine Network expressed support to ABC:

ABC is our competitor, and a tough one at that, but there is something bigger at stake here than beating a rival.

The ABC ban was also denounced by other media groups in the region. The New Zealand Parliamentary Press Gallery said:

This decision follows already restrictive conditions, limiting the number of journalists who can attend this important regional summit. While infrastructure constrains play a role in limited pooling numbers, we are appalled by this attempt to control media coverage.

Dan McGarry, the media director of Vanuatu Daily Post, explained why the newspaper will not be sending a delegate to Nauru in September:

I instructed the Daily Post’s editor to withdraw our reporter from the Vanuatu media delegation allotted to covering this event.

This isn’t a self-righteous, moralising action. It’s a survival tactic. If we allow ourselves to get into a situation where our ability to report is predicated on how positive our coverage is, then we can’t do our job.

Pacific Island News Association urged Nauru to reconsider its decision to promote media diversity:

The Pacific is on display and can be proud of its media diversity and efforts to strengthen our communities through dialogue and communication.

The International Federation of Journalists said Nauru had set a dangerous precedent:

Governments, leaders and politicians must remember the role of the media, and not use their powers to control and stifle press freedom. The Nauru government is setting a dangerous precedent by barring ABC journalists’ from covering the Pacific Island Forum.

The September event hosted by Nauru is the 49th Pacific Islands Forum.

Pacific Media Watch reports that the New Zealand-based Pacific Media Centre condemned the selective ban by the Nauru government in what it said was an authoritarian affront to media freedom in the region.

Director Professor David Robie, who also criticised Australian hypocrisy over Pacific media freedom, said:

Clearly the Nauru government is determined to gag any independent efforts to speak truth to power …

This is shocking and painfully obvious that Australia has much to hide in the region just like the Nauru government.

Nauru is unranked in the Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index. However, the Nauru ban was criticised at an RSF Asia-Pacific media freedom summit in Paris last week.

Mong Palatino is an activist contributor to Global Voices and a two-term congressman in the Philippine House of Representatives. He blogs at Mongster’s Nest. This article is republished from Global Voices under a Creative Commons licence.

The allocation of $15 million for public broadcasting will be split between RNZ, New Zealand on Air and a new fund targeting “under-served audiences”. It’s the biggest single boost for public broadcasting for a decade, but will it make a big difference?

“It’s the beginning of a new era,” said Broadcasting and Digital Media Minister Claire Curran, announcing the new funding arrangements.

She flourished a graph from a report showing how spending on public broadcasting in other countries dwarfs our own.

It was “shameful and embarrassing,” she said.

“This increase … is just the beginning.”

Labour went into the last election talking a good game too.

It pledged $38 million a year more for RNZ and public broadcasting funding agency New Zealand On Air to deliver “quality New Zealand programming and journalism modeled on the ABC in Australia”.

Multimedia platform
Curran said the bulk of the money would create a new multimedia platform called RNZ+ and a TV channel on Freeview was part of the plan.

But once in government, Labour earmarked only $15 million more for public media in the Budget in May. Plans for a TV channel were talked down and are now spoken of as merely “an aspiration” for the future.

The new money will now be split four ways.

RNZ chief executive Paul Thompson described the $4.5 million added to RNZ’s $35 million annual public funding as “a dose of steroids”.

“We’ll make you proud, Minister” said NZOA’s chair Dr Ruth Harley, welcoming a $4 million boost to its $100 million-a-year budget for local TV shows and digital content.

The minister said a further $6 million will go into a new “Innovation Fund” to create “more public media content for under-served audiences such as Māori and Pacific Peoples, children and regional New Zealand.”

Both RNZ and NZOA jointly suggested this idea, but suggested only $2 million for the new fund, leaving $8.5m for “stage one of the RNZ+ plan”.

Independent producers
The content will appear on RNZ platforms but it will be made by independent producers commissioned by NZ On Air, the minister said.

Other media companies had opposed the funding increase and TV and film production companies jointly called for $20 million extra for New Zealand on Air instead.

Last year, MediaWorks chief executive Michael Anderson claimed RNZ+ could wipe out his business and hired a lobbyist to talk the minister out of it. New Zealand on Air funding is a significance source of finance for some of its local programmes on TV channel Three.

He was happy with this week’s announcement.

“It targets the right communities and gives RNZ support and extra funding for NZ On Air makes sense,” he told Mediawatch.

The minister’s advisory group – after many weeks chewing over the issues – appear to have tried to keep RNZ, NZOA and independent programme-makers happy with a roughly even split of the fresh funds.

“Keeping our entities happy is not how I would describe it but I don’t see that as being a bad thing,” Curran told Mediawatch.

Better collaboration
“This is stage one. We are working on how to make better collaboration happen across the other public media such as Māori TV, Pacific media and state-owned TVNZ,” she said.

Clearly more money is welcome for organisations that have not had a substantial boost for years and it could go a long way. (Certainly further than the 200 hours of content local TV producers say they could generate with $20 million more funding).

The minister’s instance that there will be more money for media in future is also a comfort for them.

But in the end this is an incremental change which puts more money into the existing system – not a transformative one.

The remaining $500,000 of the new funding will be spent on researching how “Crown-funded media agencies can use their assets more efficiently.”

Perhaps it would be better if that had been done before the new funding arrangements were made. State-owned TVNZ for example has substantial assets – and big audiences – but no public mandate at all any more.

It has no role in the funding revealed this week.

Australian comparison
“Compared with Australia, the $216 million spent on broadcasting in 2017/18 is clearly inadequate,” Curran said at the announcement.

Her chart – from a PWC report commission by the Ministry for Culture and Heritage – showed Australia spends $1.6 billion on public broadcasting.

That is about $67 per person a year as opposed to just under $50 a head here. But Australians get a lot more public broadcasting for their money. They get commercial-free ABC TV channels, on-demand video and local and national radio as well ethnic-focused SBS radio and TV and indigenous channel NITV.

The ABC – the model for Labour’s policy according to its pre-election manfesto – is entirely funded directly by the government and is accountable for all of it.

How much you spend isn’t always the issue, but how you spend it.

The Pacific Media Centre has a content sharing partnership with RNZ Pacific.

The Nauru government’s refusal to allow the ABC from entering the country to cover the upcoming Pacific Islands Forum is disgraceful.

It is against the fundamentals of a free press.

It cannot be condoned.

READ MORE: Nauru government bans ABC from Pacific Forum

To allow a government to dictate which media outlets covers a story is tantamount to censorship and as journalists and as members of a healthy democracy, we cannot accept it.

ABC is our competitor, and a tough one at that, but there is something bigger at stake here than beating a rival.

Even in the Nauru government’s attempt to explain the move, the hypocrisy was blatant.

While the government claimed it only placed restrictions “on a number of people from all sectors” due to “very limited accommodation” and there was “no restrictions placed on media attendance for any reason other than this indisputable fact of accommodation and facility available”, it also said the ABC was not welcome because the government does not like what it reports.

The statement said the ABC would not be granted access “under any circumstances due to this organisation’s blatant interference in Nauru’s domestic politics prior to the 2016 election, harassment of and lack of respect towards our president in Australia, false and defamatory allegations against members of our government, and continued biased and false reporting about our country.

“It is our right, as it is the right of every nation, to choose who is allowed to enter.”

Many Australian media outlets are standing in solidarity with the ABC – as the Federal Parliamentary Press Gallery president David Crowe said: “If the ban is not reversed, the media pool will be disbanded. If one cannot go, none will go.”

And it’s not just Aussie media dismayed by this move by the Nauru government.

Vanuatu’s Daily Post has withdrawn its reporter from the Vanuatu media delegation allotted to covering the event.

“This isn’t a self-righteous, moralising action. It’s a survival tactic. If we allow ourselves to get into a situation where our ability to report is predicted on how positive our coverage is, then we can’t do our job,” Daily Post media director Dan McGarry explained.

Of course, not all are of that view – the ABC’s natural enemy News Corp will still be attending.

Red Ink is Australia’s Nine Network “ears and eyes behind the big decisions, the gossip and spin” in the media world. Nauru is due to host the 49th Pacific Islands Forum and related meetings from September 3-6, 2018.

• Nauru’s ban on ABC splits commercial media
• Vanuatu Daily Post editorial on the issue
• IFJ calls on Nauru president to revoke ban on ABC journalists
• Outrageous Nauru ban on ABC journalists
• World public broadcasters group says ban is unacceptable

A group of Australia-based supporters is trying to revitalise Australian broadcasting in the Pacific and Asia region.

For more than 50 years, ABC-Radio Australia was a trusted and respected friend in the region broadcasting independent news and information, says the group in a media release.

But five years ago, the service was almost silenced by budget cuts.

READ MORE – AND ACT: Review of Australian broadcasting services in the Asia-Pacific

It has recently been revealed that Radio Australia’s shortwave frequencies into the Pacific and Asia have been taken over by China Radio International.

The supporters group says that now, because of a new political environment in Canberra and across the region, the time is right to propose a major upgrade of ABC radio, television and digital services to the Asia Pacific.

The group wants people to have their say at a review of Australia’s broadcasting in the region being held by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and the Department of Communication and the Arts.

It would like to see the review recommend the reinstatement of full ABC Asia-Pacific broadcasting with a new model of stronger partnerships between Australia and the region.

The supporters group includes household names in the Pacific like former ABC-Radio Australia correspondents Sean Dorney and Jemima Garrett along with former Radio Australia Network manager Sue Ahearn.

Garrett said the Australian media, in the form of the ABC’s international services [Radio Australia, Australia Plus TV, and digital and online services) had played a crucial role in promoting debate, transparency and good governance in the Pacific and Asia.

She said the ABC had provided a powerful role-model and, through its presence and reporting empowered journalists in the region, to tackle stories that are difficult but of important public interest.

Independent journalism
Ahearn said this was a chance for those who cared about independent journalism and democracy to be heard.

“Your submission does not need to be long, even a few sentences is valuable. The more perspectives the review receives the better,” he said.

The review is asking for submissions from individuals and organisations in Asia and the Pacific as well as Australia.

The purpose/objective of the review “is to assess the reach of Australia’s media in the Asia Pacific region, including examining whether shortwave radio technology should be used”.

The review is instructed to analyse:

• the coverage and access of existing Australian media services in the Asia-Pacific region
• the use and value of Australian shortwave technology in the Asia Pacific region.

And the review will cover:
• all media distribution platforms (television, radio and online)
• commercial, community and publicly funded services
• different types of technologies such as analogue, digital and satellite radio and television services and online services.
A link to the submission portal is here.

Submissions close on August 3, 2018.

You can join the Facebook site here.

Or join the group on Twitter.

For more information and interviews, please contact Sue Ahearn or Jemima Garrett.
sue.ahearn@gmail.com or +61 439474444
garrett.jemima@gmail.com or +61 408163226

China has taken over many of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s former shortwave radio frequencies into the Pacific.

In response to budget cuts, the ABC last year ceased shortwave broadcasting in the Asia-Pacific region ahead of a switch to FM transmission.

Many remote communities in Pacific island countries rely on shortwave radio.

READ MORE: New Zealand’s Pacific reset: Strategic anxieties about rising China

Australia-based technology observer Peter Marks told Radio ABC’s Tech Head programme that since that withdrawal, the space was swiftly being filled.

“Since Radio Australia has dropped off shortwave, many of the exact frequencies we used to use have been now taken over by Chinese stations targetting the Asia-Pacific region,” he explained.

“Now, shortwave bounces off the upper atmosphere, so a single shortwave transmitter can be heard over thousands of kilometres. It works particularly well over the many islands throughout the Pacific region.”

Snapped up
The revelation that the frequencies have been snapped up comes at a time of heightened speculation in Australian media and commentaries about the motives behind China’s growing influence in the Pacific.

“There’s obviously a bit of interest there… the fact that China has been ramping up while we’ve been pulling back,” Marks said.

“I should say that Radio New Zealand International (now known as RNZ Pacific) does a terrific job in the Pacific. They’re up there every day and they’re managing to run it. It just seems odd that Australia wouldn’t be doing it.

The withdrawal of ABC’s shortwave presence in the Pacific is part of an ongoing Australian government review of the country’s media services in the wider region.

The Pacific Media Centre has a content sharing arrangement with RNZ Pacific.

• China takes over Radio Australia frequencies after ABC drops shortwave
• More Pacific radio stories

The 77 Chinese citizens deported from Fiji by uniformed Chinese police in August were sex workers, according to an investigative report by the Australia Broadcasting Corporation.

The ABC’s Background Briefing investigation by Hagar Cohen has reported an unnamed source challenging official claims that the deported individuals were involved in an online gambling fraud ring, reports Fiji Newswire.

According to the ABC investigative report, Police Commissioner Sitiveni Qiliho declined to comment on the allegations.

The Office of the Prime Minister and the Chinese Embassy in Suva did not reply to the ABC’s requests.

The ABC reported that the deportees were “mainly young women brought to Fiji to service the Chinese diaspora,” and those locals close to their Nadi house said the inhabitants were primarily young women aged between 15 and 19.

One of those deportees was a young mother with a baby.

LISTEN: Fiji Silenced – China’s secret mission exposed on Sunday Extra: Background Briefing (Part 1)

In the two weeks before their removal, witnesses reported seeing Fijian police officers moving in and out of the compound — including movements that resembled a changing of the guard, and overnight shifts.

According to one local, who asked not to be identified, several of the women had attempted to escape but were chased and caught by local police.

• Chinese police grab 77 suspected fraudsters from Fiji
• Fiji police finally admit deportation, reveal little else

As a magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck off the coast of Kirakira in the Solomon Islands early today, triggering a tsunami warning across the Pacific, many residents of the country would have turned to shortwave radio for more information.

The tsunami warning has since been called off, though assessments of damage from the quake are not yet complete.

Sadly, this vital communication service is under threat in this already under-resourced region.

For almost 80 years, Australia has provided such shortwave services, including vital emergency service information, to Asia and the Pacific.

But government funding cuts saw Asian services turned off in January 2015. And now the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) has decided to cut the remaining services to residents of remote parts of the Pacific, Papua New Guinea and parts of northern Australia by ceasing its shortwave radio services to the Pacific from the end of January 2017.

The ABC has argued the shortwave transmissions, which can travel thousands of kilometres and be picked up by low-cost transmitters run on batteries or solar power, are outdated. Michael Mason, ABC’s Director of Radio said:

While shortwave technology has served audiences well for many decades, it is now nearly a century old and serves a very limited audience. The ABC is seeking efficiencies and will instead service this audience through modern technology.

The problem is, of course, that in remote places in the Pacific, particularly in Melanesian nations such as Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands, there is no access to an FM signal, limited internet and, where internet is available, it is expensive.

Advances in technology such as low-earth orbit satellites, which provide high speed global internet services, show promise. But, as yet, the receiving technology is expensive and the receivers aren’t available in rural and remote area.

How shortwave evades censors
The ABC has said it will replace international shortwave services with digital services including a web stream, in-country FM transmitters, an Australia Plus expats app and partner websites and apps such as TuneIn radio and vTurner.

There was no mention of the use of updates to shortwave technologies, such as Digital Radio Mondiale, which is being used by Radio New Zealand, or using shortwave for digital data transmission, which cannot be censored or jammed.

The move away from shortwave to FM transmissions and digital and mobile services has been accelerated despite the fact that FM frequencies can easily be shut down by disaffected political leaders, as happened in Fiji in 2009 on the order of then self-appointed – but since elected in 2014 – Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama.

It was a matter of national pride at the time for the ABC to be providing independent information for Fijians via shortwave, with then managing director of the corporation, Mark Scott, highlighting a text message sent from inside Fiji to the ABC, which read: “We are trying to listen to you online but are having difficulty. Please keep broadcasting. You are all we have”.

Shortwave radio has played a valuable role in getting information to communities in the middle of civil disturbance, such as in East Timor in the lead up to independence.

In Burma, it was internal leaders who sought the shortwave services. In 2009, Burmese pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi called on Australia to provide shortwave broadcasts. At the time the ABC’s director of international, Murray Green, said the move reflected the ABC’s ongoing commitment to serving people in those parts of Asia and the Pacific who live without press freedom. Even before this announcement was made, the price of shortwave radios was increased in Burma’s Sittwe market.

Keeping people safe from disaster
It isn’t just a matter of providing information to censored countries. Shortwave also provides a reliable source of information, particularly during natural disasters.

Shortwave provides vital warnings of tsunamis to outlying island nations. It was a lasting communication method after the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, and was vital in the response to 2015’s Cyclone Pam, which devastated Vanuatu.

Shortwave transmissions go over mountains and seas, have a longer range, and don’t fall over and twist in storms like FM radio towers.

Shortwave is seen as a vital part of keeping communities safe. As an ABC correspondent wrote on their Facebook page, and as technology reporter Peter Marks mentioned on air, after Cyclone Pam:

We expected the worst. Death, injury, hunger. But when we arrived, the Dillons Bay village chief … told me they knew the cyclone was approaching, so they sheltered in the two solid buildings in the village. Most houses were flattened but not a single injury. I asked him how he knew the cyclone was approaching. He said, ‘ABC Radio’.

New Zealand and the UK take on China
The cuts to the shortwave services at the ABC are just the latest in a long line of budget savings to its international services.

While other cuts to the broadcaster garnered many headlines, the ABC has cut the shortwave, and also quietly closed its Vietnamese, Khmer and Burmese language services on 2 December  2016. The French-language service to the French Pacific is due to end in February 2017.

Thankfully for Pacific nations, while Australia is dialling back its shortwave services, New Zealand’s RNZ International is maintaining Pacific-wide shortwave transmission. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has also announced a major boost to its international broadcasts, including producing shortwave radio programmes for North Korea. The BBC is fearful of the rise of state-backed broadcasters such as China’s CCTV, Qatar’s Al Jazeera, and Russia’s RT.

The Pacific appears to be a specific concern for China, with Australia’s Lowy Institute tracking the extent of China’s aid programme in the Pacific at more than 200 projects worth $US1.4 billion since 2006 and the state-owned Xinhua News Agency actively covering the Asia Pacific.

In light of this, the BBC clearly recognises a need to boost its international broadcasting, using shortwave to beat censors in autocratic regimes.

It is a great shame for the Pacific that Australia no longer agrees.

Dr Alexandra Wake, a senior lecturer in journalism at RMIT, is an academic who maintains a career as a freelance journalist. Her last assignment for ABC Radio Australia was more than two years ago. This article was first published by The Conversation today and is republished under a Creative Commons licence and with the permission of the author.

• Magnitude 7.8 wake strikes Solomon Islands – tsunami warning eases

Reporter Linton Besser and cameraman Louie Eroglu had questioned Najib during a public event in Kuching over a corruption scandal, and police had claimed they had crossed a security cordon — an allegation they deny.

Last night, Besser and Eroglu were told they would likely be charged with obstructing a public servant in the discharge of their duties. If they were found guilty of the charge they could have faced two years in prison.

But three hours after the pair were given the order to appear in court on Tuesday morning, their lawyer was called by police and told no charges would be filed and they may be able to leave the country today after some paperwork.

Yesterday the lawyer for the ABC pair, Albert Tang, said he received a call from Ng Ahlek, the superintendent of police for Malaysia’s Padawan District, telling him to bring his clients to court at 8:30am (local time) so they could be charged.

“When asked who made the decision to institute the charge against my clients, he said it was the Attorney-General who made the decision,” Tang said.

Tang said normally those decisions were made by a local deputy public prosecutor.

Change unclear
ABC South East Asia correspondent Adam Harvey said it was not clear why there had been a change of heart.

“The lawyer was called in the middle of the night and told it’s all off you don’t have to go to the court,” he said.

“What you’ll need to do is bring the ABC team to a police station here where we’ll do some paperwork and hopefully a few hours after that they’ll be able to leave Malaysia, which was just not looking like happening any time soon just a few hours ago.”

Najib, 62, has been under fire for a year over allegations concerning as much as $1.4 billion being deposited into his personal bank account. He has denied any wrongdoing.

The pair were arrested after Besser questioned Najib as he walked into a mosque on Saturday night, asking the Prime Minister why hundreds of millions of dollars had been deposited into his bank account.

ABC News director Gaven Morris has previously denied the allegations that were made about the behaviour of Besser and Eroglu at the event in Kuching.

“I can tell you that at no time did our journalists obstruct or intend to obstruct any public servants in performance of their duties,” Morris said in a statement yesterday.

“They did not see a police line and do not believe they crossed one. They stopped filming and left the event as soon as they were asked. They fully cooperated with the police before and after their arrest.”

Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop has said Australia’s High Commissioner in Malaysia was in contact with the pair.

Earlier story