Lachlan Murdoch has added his voice to the growing chorus of opposition to section 35P of the ASIO Act - it's just a shame he didn't speak out before the law was passed, writes Michael Bradley.

One of the most remarkable aspects of the debate about section 35P of the ASIO Act (which enables journalists and anyone else to be put in jail for reporting on "special intelligence operations") is that most of it is occurring after the law has already been passed.

It went through both Houses of Parliament with no argument and the support of all parties except the Greens, along with almost no adverse media commentary.

Since then, various journalists have come out with impassioned complaints about the devastating impact this law has on press freedom and our right to know what our government is doing in our name. Why they didn't think to do so when it was only a draft is a mystery, given that it was hardly a secret and that its effects were always obvious.

Now Lachlan Murdoch has belatedly joined the party, delivering a strong attack on s35P in the course of his Keith Murdoch oration last night. He repeated most of the points which have been made elsewhere, with the ringing call to arms that "our freedom of speech and freedom of the press are not things we should blindly entrust to anyone" and that "censorship should be resisted in all its forms".

It's fair enough that Murdoch went looking for a way to tie his grandfather Sir Keith Murdoch into the picture, which he did by recounting Sir Keith's efforts back in 1915 to expose the truth about the disastrous Gallipoli campaign, in defiance of government censorship.

"Would the Gallipoli campaign have been a special [intelligence] operation?" Lachlan asked, perhaps using artistic licence to avoid the obvious answer, which is "no". Even George Brandis, who recently described our current campaign in Iraq as not a war but "a humanitarian mission with military elements", would have struggled to call World War I an intelligence operation.

Nevertheless, Murdoch's criticisms of the Government's obsession with secrecy, and willingness to take away freedoms which we just spent a thousand years or so acquiring, were well founded and might be assumed to provide further affirmation that, in the opinion of Australia's mainstream media, with s35P the Government has overstepped.

Actually, not entirely. While most media organisations either opposed s35P before it was passed or have come out against it since, there's a major exception and it's owned by a guy called Murdoch. On September 29, the News Ltd flagship The Australian published an editorial under the title "Homegrown terror threat needs new tools to fight it". Citing the Numan Haider incident as evidence that "it is now beyond doubt that authorities are acting on very real threats to Australians", the editorial stated, "The new counter-terrorism laws are not an attack on free speech; they are a protection against an evolving threat."

The Australian commented further that "behind the critique of these laws is often a suspicion that the government is seeking an increase in powers for political purposes and is elevating an imagined threat". After an 800-officer set of terror raids that were pre-briefed to the media and resulted in one arrest and a plastic sword, yeah, that's pretty much exactly our suspicion. It's sweetly endearing that The Australian is so trusting of our Government, to the extent that it is prepared on faith to surrender its own historical freedom of reportage in response to a threat which the Government says exists but of which we (the people) have seen almost no actual evidence.

Of course, Lachlan Murdoch should not be held accountable for the opinions of his father's newspapers, and he should be commended for what he said. It's a shame he didn't speak out earlier, but that criticism applies to most of our mainstream media. And The Australian itself gets credit for fairly reporting Murdoch's comments today. Hopefully, more prominent voices will now join Mr Murdoch's and the momentum for an early repeal of s35P will start to build.

Michael Bradley is the managing partner of Marque Lawyers, a boutique Sydney law firm. View his full profile here.