Secret: The Making of Australia's Security State by Brian Toohey (review)

Brian Toohey, one of Australia's most distinguished journalists, has written extensively about Australia's national security since 1973. He has been an editor of The National Times and a Canberra and Washington correspondent for the Australian Financial Review. As an investigative reporter, he was instrumental in breaching the wall of official secrecy to make public such stories as the plutonium contamination that resulted from British atomic weapons tests at Maralinga in South Australia in the 1950s. He is also the author or co-author of four other books on national security and economic policy. Two of these in particular–Oyster: The Story of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (co-authored in 1989 with William Pinwill) and The Book of Leaks: Exposés in Defence of the Public's Right to Know (co-authored in 1987 with Marian Wilkinson)–inform his latest publication. It is a comprehensive investigation into the making of what he describes as Australia's "security state," a phenomenon normally associated with dictatorships since World War II. Toohey demonstrates that while the origins of Australia's security state go back to the Cold War, it reached its apogee in the ever-increasing security laws enacted after 2001. These include the National Security Legislation Amendment (Espionage and Foreign Interference) Act 2018, which Toohey castigates as "potentially criminalis[ing] a vast range of media reporting on everyday politics" (233).

Examples of the operation of Australia's security state abound. One is the discovery, after publication of Toohey's book, of a man held in an ACT gaol who had been imprisoned in secret. Commenting on this latter-day man in the iron mask, former Supreme Court Judge Anthony Whealy asked: "Are we now a totalitarian state where people are prosecuted, convicted and shunted off to prison without they or the public having any notion as to what happened?" Another episode that Toohey discusses occurred following the Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs Alexander Downer's permission for the Australian Security Intelligence Service (ASIS), under David Irvine, to bug the East Timorese government's offices in Dili. This was at a time when it was engaged in negotiations with Australia on petroleum leases in the Timor Sea. In 2013, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, again under David Irvine, seized documents from a solicitor for an ASIS officer. This officer had led the operation authorised by Downer and then publicised it after learning that Downer had been appointed to the board of Woodside Petroleum, a company that had benefited from the negotiations on which ASIS had spied. Both the solicitor, Bernard Collaery, and the ASIS officer, "Witness K," are being prosecuted in secret under the Intelligence Services Act 2001. In his analysis, Toohey underlines the hypocrisy of a government enacting "laws savagely penalising anyone involved in foreign interference in Australia, yet defend[ing] its own grubby act of foreign interference in Timor-Leste" (27). The case also underlines another theme in Toohey's book, namely that excessive secrecy–by allowing Australian bureaucracies to avoid public scrutiny–encourages them to make poor decisions. In this sense, Australia's experience parallels that of the USA where, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan has argued in Secrecy: the American Experience (1998), excessive secrecy produced the Bay of Pigs debacle, Watergate, the Iran–Contra affair and the failure to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Toohey's book consists of 60 chapters beginning with the establishment and growth of the Australian intelligence agencies in the Cold War, Australia's hosting of British atomic tests and its invitation to the USA to establish facilities at Northwest Cape, Pine Gap and Nurrungar. He goes on to discuss the origins and history of the Australia, New Zealand, US Security Treaty (ANZUS), the contest between the Nixon administration and the Whitlam government and the legal architecture of Australia's security state. He has a lengthy section on Australia's 13 wars since colonial times, arguing that only one of these...