ADJOURNMENT
Senator SHOEBRIDGE (New South Wales) (21:33): It's no secret that, in Australia, the police and courts often end up doing the dirty work for corporations—not to deliver justice, but to be part of a system that exhausts their critics into silence. Last month, the WA Supreme Court threw out Woodside's discovery application against three climate defenders pursued over a 2023 climate protest.
The judge found the case didn't rise above conjecture and looked more like part of a broader campaign to discourage protest against Woodside's projects altogether, rather than a legitimate legal claim by this corporate giant. One of the largest gas companies in this country, planning to drill more than 50 new wells at Scott Reef and expand the Burrup Hub, chose to spend its resources not defending that plan on the merits but trying to bury a couple of young climate activists in legal costs.
What a disgrace Woodside is. That's state capture in practice—a company so powerful, so connected to power, that it can weaponise the justice system against citizens who are only trying to hold it to account and protect the planet. We need federal anti-SLAPP laws that empower courts to throw these cases out early, before they can achieve their real purpose of letting corporations bank citizens into silence.
I'm going to speak about the fate facing a number of former AFP undercover operatives who have been all but abandoned by the AFP and by the Albanese Labor government. Three senior AFP undercover members achieved what the AFP described as an unprecedented level of infiltration into global criminal syndicates historically resistant to covert penetration. Project Bulwark, the AFP's specialist function responsible for assessing and managing threats to AFP members, assessed the members as facing an 'expected' if not certain threat as a result of this incredibly brave work.
Despite the identified threat, the members' initial attempts to obtain assistance to protect them and their families were met with what they perceived as efforts to dismiss, to discredit and to minimise the seriousness of the threat they all faced. This led the Australian Federal Police Association, in an almost-unheard-of exercise, to exercise its workplace entry powers to look at how Project Bulwark had operated.
Given the expected threat identified by Bulwark, the members requested immediate offshore relocation for them and their families. The AFP initially offered to relocate the individuals without their families to another state of Australia and stated to the members that this was purely done to assist with their anxiety and was not safety related, and the relocation was a danger to those officers.
The AFP could not provide a return date to their family, nor would they commit to the families ever visiting the location. A subsequent FOI application revealed that the AFP notified Comcare that the relocation occurred due to safety concerns, not welfare concerns as stated by the AFP. Approximately 12 months later, a body of work designed to review the threat reassessed the threat to these officers from 'expected' to just 'possible', despite no material change in the underlying circumstances.
The members identified significant concerns with that reassessment, including the removal or exclusion of relevant threat actors, including organisational threats from even the assessment; departure from the AFP's national guideline on security risk management; a material reduction in the assessed threat without any identifiable change in the underlying risk; and the apparent use of a methodology not otherwise known to be used for AFP threat assessments.
The members were later advised by a former assistant commissioner that there was a direction at the highest level to minimise the threat level, to reduce any potential compensation payouts. The matter initially proceeded, following a complaint from the officers, as a criminal investigation involving six AFP executive and senior executive members. Investigators advised the AFP members that they were confident criminal charges would be laid against at least two or three individuals, and, if the matter were treated administratively, the conduct was sufficiently serious that all those involved would lose their employment.
Of course, the investigation was subsequently transferred from the criminal to the administrative framework by the AFP senior officers. Despite the earlier assessment expressed by investigators, only two of the six individuals ultimately received substantiated findings, but those findings were devastating. However, one of those members is still employed and currently on active duty within the AFP, and the other has advised people that he was able to retire.
Those findings were classified as category 3, serious misconduct, and related to the management of these brave AFP members' safety. The members and the AFPA were advised that the findings could not be made against more senior executives in the AFP because, according to the AFP investigation, that required a higher evidentiary standard arising from the Briginshaw principle.
In this case, the AFP abused that principle of law to say that a higher degree of proof was required to make adverse findings against more senior AFP members. That's the club all over. The central issue continues to be whether the AFP identified a serious and foreseeable threat to three highly exposed undercover members; they failed to implement or demonstrate appropriate treatment of the threat to those AFP members; they initially represented that risk assessments existed when they subsequently proved not to exist at all; the AFP re-engineered the threat-assessment process outside the AFP's specialist threat-assessment function; the AFP removed relevant threat actors and departed from the AFP's prescribed security-risk methodology without explanation; and the AFP subsequently reduced the assessed threat from 'expected' to 'possible' without any apparent material change in circumstances and failed to hold the senior decision-makers accountable despite the matter initially being considered potentially serious enough to constitute serious criminal conduct.
Regardless of all of the above acknowledgements of threat and identified misconduct, the AFP and Minister Burke continue to ignore the serious safety environment these members and their families continue to live in because they put their lives on the line for all of us. The Commonwealth and Minister Burke have now been served with legal proceedings to try and achieve some justice for these AFP officers.
Minister Burke is aware of this and so far has done nothing. I'm putting this on the record tonight at the request of these officers to break through the wall of silence, because I know—and any fair-minded Australian who saw this would agree—these officers and their families deserve protection. They deserve so much better than this.
Minister Burke, the ball is in your court. Fix this. Right now, there's a forensic excavation underway at Chemmani in Jaffna in Sri Lanka. 544 sets of human skeletal remains have been identified across the excavation.
Some remains, based on their size, are believed to include infants and very young children. This is not a new story for Sri Lanka. Human Rights Watch has documented around 20 mass grave sites across the country, and not one has been successfully investigated to completion.
Chemmani has been on the record since 1998, when Amnesty International first called for an independent, internationally supported excavation and investigation. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, visited the site and called for robust investigations by independent forensic experts, and, of course, the families and the community fundamentally deserve answers.
In September last year, Australia told the UN Human Rights Council it remained committed to supporting Sri Lanka's reconciliation, accountability and transitional justice, and now we need to follow through. That means supporting the preservation of the whole site, backing an independently verifiable chain of custody for remains and evidence and actively working with the Sri Lankan government to ensure this investigation is robust and independent and produces accountability and justice.
I join with the Tamil community of Australia to say that our government should be raising Chemmani bilaterally with Sri Lanka, acknowledging these first steps taken by the Sri Lankan government and keeping these issues on the agenda in those bilateral discussions and at the UN Human Rights Council.