The Australian government is amassing an ever-increasing legal bill in its ongoing pursuit of secrecy in the Bernard Collaery case, spending a further $250,000 since dropping the prosecution in July.
The attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, intervened to end the Collaery prosecution in July, a decision widely welcomed by lawyers, human rights advocates and Collaery’s supporters.
Despite the end of the case, the government decided it would maintain a push initiated by the Coalition to have parts of the Collaery proceedings suppressed from public view.
The commonwealth is continuing to argue that a key judgment in the case should not be published without redactions, which it says are necessary to protect national security.
The attorney general’s department was unable to say exactly how much the push for secrecy had cost taxpayers.
But it said its legal bill for the Collaery and Witness K cases on 7 July, the date on which the Collaery prosecution ended, was $5.148m.
That legal bill had grown by $248,000 in the three months to October, the department said.
The department said the extra costs were not “solely attributable” to its ongoing application to suppress parts of the case, and noted there “can also be a delay between external legal costs being incurred and invoices being received and paid”.
The ruling the government is seeking to suppress was made by the ACT court of appeal last year.
The court ruled Collaery’s trial should not take place in secret, saying such a move would pose a “very real risk of damage to public confidence” and citing the importance of open justice in preventing “political prosecutions”.
But the court was left unable to publish its full reasons for making the decision because of an intervention by the then Coalition government.
The Coalition argued that publishing the decision would release sensitive information to the public and undermine Australia’s national security, an argument maintained by the new government.
Collaery has been increasingly vocal about his treatment in the past month. In October, his first speech since the case was dropped, he likened his prosecution to a “Moscow show trial”.
“Without the pro bono efforts of the partners and staff of a stellar law firm, Gilbert + Tobin, and a troupe of brilliant pro bono barristers, I would not have survived the Coalition’s attempt to hide its dirty linen,” Collaery said in a lecture for the Queensland Council for Civil Liberties.
Collaery, a lawyer, and his former client, Witness K, an intelligence officer, were charged for their role in exposing a 2004 mission to bug the Timor-Leste government offices. The espionage took place during sensitive commercial negotiations to carve up oil and gas reserves in the Timor Sea, which a collection of corporates, led by Woodside, were seeking to exploit.
In his speech last month, Collaery said prosecutors should have known there was no lawful basis for the spy mission.
“Instead of facing up to this, the prosecution aided the Coalition in a cruel four-year long attempt to hide dirty linen and punish Witness K and myself for speaking up for Australian values,” he said.
