Press Freedom Is Slipping Away

Over the weekend, a shooter disrupted the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner – a dinner in the United States that gathers politicians and journalists to celebrate the First Amendment and the role of a free press. President Trump has committed to rescheduling the event, and has defiantly refused, in his words, “to let anybody take over our society”.

There are many threats to free speech and press freedom around the world, especially in Australia which unfortunately does not have a constitutionally explicit equivalent of America’s First Amendment.

When free speech and freedom of the press are not treated as bedrock principles, they are often treated as bargaining chips. Free expression becomes something to be scaled back, qualified, licensed, suppressed, monitored and regulated by the political class whenever it feels threatened or inconvenienced.

Australian journalists are not marched off in the night. However, in a more subtle and insidious form of tyranny, we have constructed a dense bureaucracy of suppression. Big Government doesn’t always need to explicitly ban speech to exert control; it can make expression and publication risky, expensive and exhausting.

From a libertarian perspective, press freedom matters because those who wield power must be held to account. Governments of all stripes hoard information for the same reason a monopoly hoards market share: because knowledge is power, and power hates competition. A free press is one of the few institutions capable of breaking that monopoly. It’s the citizen’s external audit – the fourth estate. It’s the mechanism by which secrets become scandals, corruption is unearthed, and powerful people are forced to answer uncomfortable questions.

Press freedom is not a boutique concern for journalists in Canberra wine bars. It’s not about flattering the media class or pretending every reporter is a saint. Rather, it is the public’s right to know what is being done in its name and with its money.

If we taxpayers fund the machine, we have every right to know how the machine operates. If ministers exercise power, the public has every right to know when that power is abused. If bureaucrats fail, lie, cover up or persecute, they should expect exposure, not protection.

The major parties in Australia have spent years moving us in the opposite direction. Labor talks about transparency until it becomes politically inconvenient. The Coalition talks about freedom until the security state asks for expanded powers. One side wraps speech regulation in the language of safety and inclusion. The other wraps it in the language of order and national security. Whether it’s the blue team or the red team, the authoritarian instincts are the same.

Australia’s whistleblower protections have been exposed as painfully weak in practice. The David McBride case sent an unambiguous message to anyone thinking of revealing alleged wrongdoing: the public interest is no shield if the state decides to make an example of you. Richard Boyle’s ordeal sent a similar message. In theory, we are told there are channels, safeguards and protections. In practice, the people who reveal misconduct are chewed up and spat out while the machine closes ranks. That’s not how a country that prioritises free speech and press freedom ought to behave. That is how a system behaves when it values secrecy more than the truth.

Australia’s ‘freedom of information’ laws increasingly resemble freedom to be ignored. A Senate inquiry described the Commonwealth FOI regime as “broken” – an accurate diagnosis of a culture in which delay is weaponised, access is resisted, and disclosure is treated as a favour rather than a democratic obligation. When lawful access to information becomes slow, hostile and unreliable, governments should not be shocked when journalists rely on leaks. The state creates the conditions for leaks by making honest transparency impossible.

Defamation law is another mess. Despite past reform, defamation can still be used as a blunt instrument against publishers and individuals who do not have bottomless pockets. A plaintiff doesn’t even need to win their case; often the process itself is enough to be ruinous.

New threats to press freedom constantly emerge, as in 2024 with the now abandoned misinformation bill. The bureaucratic mind always believes it can censor responsibly. It didn’t take long for parts of that legislation to resurface in the wake of the Bondi Beach terror attack. Many love to imagine there will always be sensible people in charge, carefully suppressing only the ‘bad’ or ‘hateful’ speech. But once the state gets a taste for acting as editor-in-chief, it does not voluntarily step back.

Similarly, national security has become a catch-all justification for opacity. Australia has drifted well beyond legitimate secrecy into a culture where secrecy is often the default and openness the exception. When courts close proceedings, when suppression orders are routine and secrecy offences proliferate, and when journalists and sources wonder whether surveillance powers can expose them, the effect is chilling. You don’t need to prosecute every whistleblower or reporter to suppress free speech; a few examples will do, and everyone gets the message.

The uniparty loves a free press in theory, but they hate it in practice.

A libertarian defence of press freedom begins with a harder truth: free societies are noisy, messy and often offensive. A genuinely free press will publish things that are wrong, premature, biased, unpleasant or embarrassing. That is the price of freedom. The alternative is not a cleaner and more rational public square, but a political class with the power to decide what the public gets to know. Ultimately, those powers will always be used against dissidents, outsiders, whistleblowers, independents and anyone else who threatens those in charge.

Australians must decide whether we want this to remain a free country where liberty is real, or merely a virtue to be occasionally signalled. If press freedom can be smothered by defamation laws, secrecy regulations, broken FOI systems, punitive prosecutions and regulator-driven speech control, free expression becomes performative. We’ll still be allowed to vote every few years, we’ll still say we live in a liberal democracy, but we’ll know less and less about what our rulers are actually doing. If that already sounds familiar, then it’s time to wake up.

In a free country, journalists don’t exist to protect the state from scrutiny; their obligation is to protect the public from the state. Australia’s political class has certainly forgotten that, and some journalists have too. We could learn a thing or two from the United States about the importance of protecting free speech and freedom of the press.

Look no further than the unequivocal and principled response from both the Trump administration and the White House press corps after the events of last weekend. Press freedom matters, not because journalists are special, but because governments aren’t unassailable, and unchecked power festers.