The prime minister’s office has refused to release any text messages between Scott Morrison and prominent QAnon supporter Tim Stewart, claiming they are not official government documents, following a two-year freedom of information battle.
In October 2019, Guardian Australia broke the news that Stewart – whose QAnon Twitter account, BurnedSpy34, was permanently suspended for “engaging in coordinated harmful activity” – was a family friend of Morrison and Stewart’s wife was on the prime minister’s staff.
Guardian Australia filed a freedom of information request for documents held by the prime minister’s office – including text messages – related to Stewart. This was later narrowed down to just the text and WhatsApp messages between the two men from September to October 2019, when the story was first reported.
The prime minister’s office refused that request, stating it “presents a significant challenge to the day-to-day execution of his duties … the time that could be spent potentially processing your request would be a substantial and unreasonable diversion with the performance of the minister’s functions”.
Guardian Australia then won an appeal to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) in late March this year, with acting commissioner Elizabeth Hampton ruling the prime minister’s office must process the request on the basis that “a practical refusal reason does not exist”.
However, in refusing the request a second time, a senior adviser to the prime minister, John Harris, claimed text messages relating to the story about one of the prime minister’s friends and the husband of someone employed to work on the prime minister’s staff were not documents that fell within the scope of freedom of information law.
“Your purported request relates to documents that, if they existed, would not fall within the meaning of ‘an official document of a minister’ as they would not relate to the affairs of an agency or of a department of state,” Harris said in a letter on Wednesday.
The adviser writes that guidelines issued by the information commissioner state documents held by a minister that do not relate to the affairs of an agency include “personal documents of a minister or the minister’s staff”.
The OAIC has in the past month ordered the PMO to process three other similar FOI requests it had previously refused.
The prime minister’s office must issue a decision on two requests for text messages from Barnaby Joyce’s time as drought envoy to the prime minister, as well as for a request from Labor for documents relating to the scandal surrounding the doctored documents Angus Taylor used to attack the City of Sydney’s climate record. Taylor has always maintained that the document was not altered or forged by his office.
In each instance, the OAIC found the PMO could not argue the demands on the office of the prime minister were such that narrowly-focused FOI requests could be refused.
A potential appeal of Wednesday’s decision would mean another lengthy wait for the OAIC to make a decision. FOI law expert Peter Timmins has previously said if the government changed after the 21 May election the messages in question would probably not be retained by an incoming Labor government.
“If … we have a different prime minister there by the time this issue is moved ahead, it’s very unlikely that records of [that kind] will be passed to the new prime minister, which would mean that you’ve run into a dead end,” he said.
Stewart claimed in messages on Signal to fellow QAnon supporters that he was passing on letters and information to the prime minister, Crikey and the ABC reported after the Guardian’s initial story.
The Four Corners program in mid-2021 raised questions as to why Morrison had used the term “ritual sexual abuse” in his apology to survivors of institutional child sexual abuse, revealing messages reportedly sent by Stewart referring to his attempts to get the words “ritual abuse” into the apology.
The term had been prominent in QAnon circles.
A spokesperson for the prime minister previously said the term “ritual” was “one that the prime minister heard directly from the abuse survivors and the National Apology to Victims and Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse Reference Group he met with in the lead-up to the apology and refers not just to the ritualised way or patterns in which so many crimes were committed but also to the frequency and repetition of them.”
In 2019, Stewart denied to Guardian Australia that he had sought to influence the prime minister on policy, and said that he had not communicated with him about the QAnon conspiracy. At the time the Four Corners program aired, Morrison said the program was “pretty ordinary” and he did not support the QAnon conspiracy theory.
