• Brian Toohey

03 June 2010It's time to drop he convention that neither side of politics comments on intelligence agencies, writes Brian Toohey in Inside Story

MEMBERS of Australia’s intelligence organisations are public servants. If they break the law, endanger the lives of fellow Australians or otherwise stuff-up, it should be a matter for public discussion. From this perspective, the shadow foreign minister, Julie Bishop, did the nation a service during an interview on 25 May when she revealed that Australian officials had forged Australian passports for security operations. Although this was not Bishop’s point, the practice is illegal and potentially dangerous for innocent passport holders. Yet many journalists, security “experts” and senior ministers reacted as if Bishop had machine-gunned a pack of girl guides laying a wreath on a memorial to Simpson and his donkey.

Bishop gave the offending interview soon after she received a government briefing on why it had expelled a member of the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad, after concluding that Israel fraudulently used Australian passports during an operation to assassinate a senior Hamas member in Dubai. Although the foreign minister, Stephen Smith, denied that Bishop had revealed what she had been told in briefings, some journalists and commentators presumed she had blurted out information she’d received confidentially. But most of the fury was directed at Bishop for breaching what Kevin Rudd called a longstanding convention that...

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