TREASURER Peter Costello heads off to Aceh next week to see how Australia’s relief funds are being used.
It’s a non-event trip for a senior government minister, which explains why he is having a hard time filling the VIP jet with full-fee-paying reporters invited to accompany him. Some media bosses have been justifiably baulking at the expense and refusing permission for their staff to travel with the Treasurer.
After all, it’s not as if he is the prime minister.
But with leadership tensions surfacing again this week, who knows what morsels Costello might toss the privileged few travelling with him.
Surely the Treasurer must want to go one better than Prime Minister John Howard’s “Athens declaration” where he not so subtly let it be known he had no plans to vacate The Lodge (not that he’s actually in The Lodge that much).
The costs might be restrictive, but there is a more than even chance that the copy being filed from the trip will be well worth it.
But as news organisations, their reporters, photographers, sound and camera people get their acts together over the trip, an interesting aside has been noted amongst the Canberra Press Gallery.
The Herald Sun’s Gerard McManus — a senior News Ltd reporter assigned to accompany the Treasurer to Aceh — has an altogether different concern to deal with.
If he is to leave Australia for Indonesia (or anywhere else for that matter) he must first seek permission from the Chief Justice of the Victorian County Court.
McManus is on bail.
He and colleague Michael Harvey — both highly respected journalists — face the possibility of jail for contempt of court.
A report they co-wrote last year after being leaked a sensitive government document has placed the pair in a precarious situation.
Officially they will face contempt charges because they refused to divulge the source of the leak when ordered to do so in court recently.
But there is no doubting that the Federal Government instigated a witch hunt because the report the Herald Sun published severely embarrassed the Government and an incompetent minister.
The yarn exposed a disregard in Government ranks for Australia’s war veterans and a reluctance to adopt recommendations to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on deserved entitlements. The news report was truly in the public interest.
There was never going to be a chance that McManus or Harvey would reveal their source — in court or otherwise. To do so would be contrary to the code of ethics responsible journalists are bound by and would severely limit the chances of receiving confidential information again.
Journalists no longer enjoy the public esteem that once accompanied practitioners of the reporting profession.
The reasons for that are many and include fault on the part of some media organisations and individual journalists.
But the actions of McManus and Harvey should restore to the public a high level of regard for reporters.
A spiteful policy
It should, but regrettably it won’t.
Most people couldn’t care less that two journalists might be locked up for abiding by their principles — even if they exposed a nasty element in Government and succeeded in forcing the dumping of a spiteful policy.
Another nasty element has been exposed in Government since the article was published by the way in which the authors of it have been pursued.
Government ministers and their senior staff leak information to journalists all of the time when it suits them. The Prime Minster is on the record as saying there is nothing wrong with that practice.
Yet a foul has been called over this embarrassing information finding its way into the public domain and two reporters could be sent to jail.
This is hypocrisy at its peak.
It is interesting to note the beginnings of a quiet revolt from some Government backbenchers who can see the writing on the wall over this issue.
Going by the number and strength of editorials expressing outrage over the action against the pursuit of the News Ltd journos, it is not a far cry to suggest that the Government will have to deal with a more hostile media than ever before if the two are jailed.
In the meantime, McManus will have to rely on a judge’s discretion to travel with the Treasurer next week.
If he and Harvey are convicted, overseas assignments could be extremely curtailed.
Certainly no one is above the law. But when a Government witch hunt leads to the law trying to force anyone to abandon their principles simply because a mean-spirited government policy was revealed to the public, then Charles Dickens was right — the law is an ass.
Chris Johnson is a federal political reporter for The West Australian newspaper.
