AFP issues humiliating correction after (another) mess

The Australian Federal Police (AFP) has been forced into a humiliating correction, clarifying that then home affairs minister Peter Dutton was, in fact, not briefed on the identity of a man later jailed for bribing Nauru government officials. 

The AFP conceded it should have used “tighter language” to avoid suggesting the opposition leader was told of the investigation into Mozammil Gulamabass Bhojani before he was awarded Australian government contracts — and who amongst us can honestly say we’ve never allowed an elected official to look utterly incompetent with a bit of imprecise language?

It’s strange to think that, after years of what seemed to be a very committed policy of minimising embarrassment for the Coalition — either by raiding journalists who made the Coalition look bad or abandoning investigations that had the potential to do the same — the AFP finally took a step in the other direction.

It seems the AFP have had an awful lotta ‘splainin to do lately. Here are a few other recent examples:

PwC

In May, AFP commissioner Reece Kershaw faced a grilling in Senate estimates over why he had not declared a conflict of interest over his friendship with PwC partner and former New South Wales police commissioner Mick Fuller. Kershaw had met with Fuller concerning a $794,000 contract, awarded to PwC without a public tender.

Asked what communication Kershaw and Fuller had shared “since the PwC scandal broke”, the commissioner responded he had received “one SMS from Mick”.

But text exchanges obtained by Greens Senator David Shoebridge under a freedom of information request showed the pair had exchanged dozens of texts since the start of the year.

“What a terrible leak against us and the AFP,” Fuller texted in February, accompanied by the “facepalm” emoji. Other topics of conversation included a misleadingly young picture of Kershaw in a news article (“haha I have a great photoshop team” he declared) and Fuller promising not to “complicate” Kershaw’s life after former PwC partner Peter-John Collins was referred to the AFP over the confidential Treasury briefings he shared with clients.

Brittany Higgins

Earlier this year, the AFP admitted it had made a mistake in providing sensitive counselling notes to prosecutors and defence lawyers during the investigation into Brittany Higgins’ claims that she was raped by fellow Liberal staffer Bruce Lehrmann, who denies the allegation.

“That’s the bottom line, we shouldn’t have handed them over and it’s a mistake that we made,” AFP detective superintendent Scott Moller told the independent inquiry into how the ACT justice system responded to Higgins’ allegations. 

Non-apologies

We suppose in some ways, these admissions — like the one in 2017, when the AFP was forced to apologise for accessing a journalist’s metadata without a warrant — make a nice change for the organisation. Crikey can think of a few occasions that the agency might have admitted an error and didn’t. The lawyers for former terrorism suspect Mohamed Haneef certainly thought so.

Haneef was arrested in Brisbane in 2007, on suspicion of links to a botched terrorism attack in Britain, and detained for 12 days without being charged. When he finally was charged, the case collapsed and he was subsequently cleared of any wrongdoing. When the inquiry into the fiasco rolled around, the AFP made a submission that Haneef’s lawyer Stephen Keim said was inadequate.

“It reveals that 15 months after Dr Haneef’s arrest the AFP remains unable to make an objective assessment of its own performance,” he said. “It illustrates that the AFP is unable to acknowledge matters which were done poorly. The submission blames others for anything that went wrong.”

On top of that, former NSW auditor-general Tony Harris noted in 2009 that the AFP had never conceded any mistake was made in tipping off Indonesian authorities regarding the “Bali Nine”, the group of Australians arrested and convicted of heroin dealing, which carries the death penalty in Indonesia.

The man who tipped off the AFP in the first place said he had been assured that they would approach one of the group members before they left the country. Instead, the AFP passed on the names, dates of birth and passport numbers of the Bali Nine to Indonesian authorities.

“Ringleaders” Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran were executed on April 29 2015. Michael Phelan, who was national manager of border and international investigation with the AFP at the time of the tip-off in 2005 was promoted to deputy commissioner in 2009.

Phelan was beside then-commissioner Andrew Colvin during the press conference held a week after Chan and Sukumaran’s death when Colvin reiterated the agency would not apologise to the families of the dead. “We can’t apologise for the role that we have to try to stop illicit drugs from coming into this country,” he said. “We regret that the Indonesian government went through with the executions.”

A previous version of this piece referred to then-AFP commissioner Andrew Colvin as “Mark Colvin”.

Can you think of other times the AFP refused to admit fault? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.