The Federal Court has ruled that the Australian Federal Police (AFP) must disclose details of its corruption investigation into a 2018 leak that implicated former SAS corporal Ben Roberts-Smith. The court rejected the AFP's arguments that releasing the information would be against the public interest after a four-year legal battle initiated by the news organization.
The Federal Court has demolished the Australian Federal Police’s attempts to keep secret the details of an anti-corruption investigation that reached the top levels of the peak policing body, having rejected arguments that releasing the information would be against the public interest.
“Hopefully future FOI appeal cases will refer to this judgment and invoke the objects of the act,” said Associate Professor Johan Lidberg, a Monash University researcher.that Roberts-Smith, a former SAS corporal, had been told by ex-AFP commissioner Mick Keelty that military authorities had secretly passed onto federal police the war crime allegations that implicated Roberts-Smith.
Multiple confidential sources aware of the trio’s involvement in the Keelty affair briefed this masthead this week after the Federal Court decision. AFP lawyers first rejected an FOI request from this masthead in 2021. Police refused it a second time late that year. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, which is designed to review FOI disputes, assessed the matter for 15 months before deciding in April 2023 not to act, and instead to refer it to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal.
On Monday, a judgment of the full bench of the Federal Court rejected the tribunal’s decision, and ordered its replacement, the Administrative Review Tribunal, to re-determine the case based on the rules set out by the court. The court also found the tribunal had got the law wrong in multiple other ways. The deputy president should not have found that “no public purpose” would have been served by the release of the information, or that it would adversely affect the AFP’s operation and management of personnel.
AFP Corruption Roberts-Smith Freedom Of Information War Crimes
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