Have you been following the Bernard Collaery and Witness K case?
In short, Witness K was the lead in 2004 bugging of the East Timor PM’s office so that the Aus Government would have the upper hand in bargaining for natural resources in the Timor Sea.
Bernard Collaery, in his past life a conservative Attorney General for the ACT and well respected barrister, represented Witness K from 2013.
Both have been charged under the National Security Act and as such their cases kept getting held in secret.
Why?
Well as Human Rights Law Centre senior lawyer Kieran Pender submitted:
“The Attorney-General’s use of secrecy in this case is entirely undemocratic: it enables the government to concede in closed court that Australia spied on Timor-Leste while continuing to refuse to admit this publicly. The NSI Act should be reformed to better safeguard the principles of openness and transparency that are at the heart of our judicial system,” Mr Pender said.
Learn more with any of these articles:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-08-06/witness-k-to-plead-guilty-lawyer-bernard-collaery-face-trial/11387046
‘There is no public interest in prosecuting Bernard Collaery and Witness K’
https://www.lawyersweekly.com.au/politics/31384-there-is-no-public-interest-in-prosecuting-bernard-collaery-and-witness-k
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-16/the-secret-trial-of-witness-k-and-bernard-collaery/12355348