The prime minister’s office has been ordered to search through Scott Morrison’s mobile phone for text messages with prominent QAnon conspiracy proponent Tim Stewart after a two-year freedom of information battle against Guardian Australia.
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 his wife was on the prime minister’s staff.
Stewart had 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 later reported.
The Four Corners program 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 had previously said the term “ritual” is “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.
“I just think it’s sort of a bit ordinary to drag other people into, I mean, I’m the prime minister, hold me to account for my views,” he said at the time. “For people who have known me or have been friends with me over the period of time, they’re entitled to their privacy regardless of if people don’t agree with their views.”
To verify some of the claims made, in October 2019 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 Stewart and Morrison between September and October 2019, when the story was first reported.
In March 2020, the prime minister’s office refused the request, stating: “The prime minister is the head of the national government and your request 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.”
Two years after Guardian Australia appealed the decision to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, the acting commissioner, Elizabeth Hampton, has ruled the prime minister’s office must process the request on the basis that “a practical refusal reason does not exist”.
The PMO sought to argue to the commissioner that it would take 50 hours to process the request, and erroneously claimed what was being sought was two years’ worth of text messages that could only be reviewed by a small number of staffers in the PM’s office, including his chief of staff.
Guardian Australia had argued in submissions that ruling against the appeal would have set a precedent that would be used by ministers and prime ministers in the future that all text messages and other mobile communications were out of bounds of freedom of information requests due to the time it would take to search their devices.
Hampton said while it was relevant to consider the prime minister has a busy schedule, she said she was not satisfied the estimated processing time was reasonable, given the PMO had mistakenly argued it was two years’ worth of text messages, and the prime minister’s office had not responded to a request for an itemised breakdown of the processing time.
The overturning of the decision means the PMO must now process the request and search through the prime minister’s phone for the relevant messages, unless the ruling is appealed to the administrative appeals tribunal.
The prime minister’s office has until 29 April to provide a decision on the request, regardless of the upcoming election and the government entering caretaker mode.
Guardian Australia has asked PMO if an appeal will be sought.
Freedom of information expert Peter Timmins said the upcoming election didn’t mean the prime minister’s office could stop processing the request, but said under FoI law, if there was a change in government, it’s unlikely the new government would have the records.
“The caretaker period doesn’t stop the clock ticking. But if for example, 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.”
It comes as the Morrison government appointed a separate freedom of information commissioner, Leo Hardiman, and will hire nine additional staff to deal with the backlog in FoI reviews. In the last financial year, the OAIC received over 1,200 review requests, up 15% on the previous year, and 140% compared with 2015-16. As of the end of June 2021, there were 667 reviews that had been open for more than a year.
