Abstract
This article examines the actual and potential effects that Australian counter-terrorism laws have on public discussion and access to information, exploring how democratic commitments to media freedom might best be balanced against contemporary demands of national security. It analyses how the laws affect the media’s ability to investigate and report on matters of public interest. It explains how the research has been conducted; identifies some of the main elements of the legal framework and the way that those elements may affect, and sometimes have affected, the media; and offers some tentative conclusions about the ways that the media have been affected which are not directly, causally attributable to the suite of counter-terrorism laws but which are important to understanding the contemporary relationship between media freedom and public discussion of matters of public interest where national security is concerned.
Highlights
The tension between press freedom and the tendencies by governments to restrict the scope of that freedom is perhaps the archetypal conflict between citizens and the state in liberal democracies (Keane, 1991; Schauer 1982)
This article outlines a project that aims to identify and evaluate the actual and potential effects that counter-terrorism laws have on public discussion and access to information, exploring how democratic commitments to media freedom might best be balanced against contemporary demands of national security
The article begins by setting out the conceptual and empirical frameworks for the research. It identifies key elements of the new laws and the way they may, and sometimes do, affect the media. It considers how the media have been affected in ways that are not directly, causally attributable to the suite of counterterrorism laws but which are important to understanding the contemporary relationship between media freedom and public discussion of matters of public interest where national security is concerned
Summary
The tension between press freedom and the tendencies by governments to restrict the scope of that freedom is perhaps the archetypal conflict between citizens and the state in liberal democracies (Keane, 1991; Schauer 1982). The Haneef matter is one of the most significant and controversial series of events in the law and politics of counter-terrorism in Australia and, as such, many interviewees had given a deal of thought to the issues that were discussed in the interviews.
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