Tons of embarrassment would have been saved and everyone could get on with incomparable exposures, such as the salaries of ABC celebs or Nathan Rees' extra-marital affair. The hacks at Holt Street can slump back in their chairs, exhausted and satisfied at the triumph of their ''free speech'' campaign. It's all rather odd. In the past 20 years or so, journalism has been turned on its head. Many of my contemporaries in the game had thought it was their duty to publish the secrets of state, to enlighten the public as to what's really going on. Great cases have been fought to defend that right. But now we find serried ranks of salaried writers believing it is their duty to cosy-up to and protect the government, particularly their preferred government, from any embarrassment. The embarrassment was made all the more apparent yesterday in the British edition of The Guardian. It reported that the usual arrangement where Five Eyes countries did not spy on each other - the US, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada - no longer applied. In fact, the NSA spies on other Five-Eye citizens, even where the partner government ''has explicitly denied the US permission to do so''. The Snowden material reveals that ''partner countries'' must not be informed about this US double-cross.

So while it is important for us to be informed that the NSA is spying on the citizens of an ally nation, it is not desirable for the Indonesians to know explicitly that we are spying on their President. It wasn't always the case that secret information was off-limits to the News empire. In 1958 Rupert Murdoch, from his fortress at the Adelaide News, is reported to have written: ''In the race between secrecy and truth, it seems inevitable that truth will always win.'' In 1987, the Murdoch-owned Sunday Times published an extract of Peter Wright's Spycatcher, which the British government was anxious to suppress. The book told of a mole within MI5, plots against PM Harold Wilson and eavesdropping on high-level Commonwealth conferences. Interesting thought … was MI5 eavesdropping on Prime Minister Tony Abbott's private conversations during the recent CHOGM in Sri Lanka? The Spycatcher case brought on lots of interesting jurisprudence. The House of Lords in Britain didn't much like Wright and sought to ban the book on the basis of the judges' idiosyncratic views about the author, who wasn't a party to the action.

In Australia president of the NSW Court of Appeal Justice Michael Kirby found that much of the information in Wright's book had been disclosed on the basis of a ''public interest defence''. The High Court said that Spycatcher could be published in Australia because if there were any real secrets in it they were Britain's problem. The groundwork for Spycatcher was established in the earlier case of Commonwealth v John Fairfax - the defence papers case. There Justice Anthony Mason significantly widened the threshold for what could be published. The government could only succeed in restraining publication of confidential information if it could establish (and it had the onus) that the material was still secret and that the publication would cause real ''detriment'' as opposed to exposing the government's action to discussion or criticism. If publication of information about the phone tapping of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono had been litigated, there would have been real jousting around whether the story posed a real detriment as opposed to an embarrassment. Abbott has comforted us by saying that any surveillance action taken was in the interests of our security. Maybe there was some concern that we were to be invaded by Indonesia. You know this was a really worthwhile story to publish because it has been so demonised by the journalists who didn't get it.

Loading Twitter: @JustinianNews Return to SMH Comment page