As the cliché goes, you couldn't make this stuff up. Classified documents from five Australian administrations covering nearly 10 years were accidentally sold in two locked filing cabinets at a second-hand furniture shop. Most were either “top secret” or “AUSTEO” (Australian Eyes Only).
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) obtained them and published some of their contents online, but withholding others for national security reasons. The Australian Security and Intelligence Agency (ASIO) have since taken custody of the original files following an agreement between the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and the ABC. The agreement protects the identity of the source who bought the filing cabinets.
The files didn't only spark jokes. Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is suing the ABC over its reporting of one of the documents which warned of “critical risks” concerning a contentious home insulation scheme during the global financial crisis in 2009. Four young installers working as part of that scheme died in separate incidents from electrocution and hyperthermia. Rudd claims that the document was referring to financial issues, not safety.A second sensitive document concerns an audit of the Australian Federal Police (AFP) revealing that the agency had apparently lost 400 files from the Cabinet’s National Security Committee (NSC) between 2008 and 2013. The AFP responded publicly, saying that the document was outdated and that the final number of files that remained unaccounted for was 33.
None of their missing files was in the ABC haul. “These documents have been destroyed, but there is no official record to indicate that this destruction occurred,” the agency said in a press release.The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet has admitted that it was responsible for the loss of the files. In a media statement, the department secretary Martin Parkinson confessed:
This casts the Department in a poor light and this failure has implications for the rest of the Australian Public Service.
Meanwhile, the ABC has revealed the back story of how they came into possession of the files. It's a great tale in itself. A “bushie” now living in Canberra bought them at auction for $AU 10 (8 US dollars) each. (A bushie is someone who comes from a rural araa of Australia.) After his own research into the contents, he contacted Michael McKinnon, the ABC's freedom of information editor. In McKinnon's words, “This one was a cracker”.
Proving once again that everything is connected, it turns out that one of McKinnon's brothers is “a deputy secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet who is currently in charge of national security for the Federal Government.”