Is this our biggest ever national security fail?

Is this our biggest ever national security fail?

IT WASN’T a raid by our spy catchers. It was “the outcome of a co-operative arrangement”.

That’s the bureaucracy’s view of what happened when ASIO officials turned up at the ABC News studios in Canberra and Brisbane in the middle of the night.

They wanted to put their hands on the embarrassing cache of cabinet documents found in two ancient filing cabinets bought at a Canberra junk shop.

The documents are still in those offices but are in safes so access to them can be restricted.

Labor today called the haul found in a second-hand furniture shop in Canberra “a blunder of massive proportions” and demanded a thorough investigation.

“It would be funny if it wasn’t so serious,” said shadow treasurer Chris Bowen.

The slow drip of news stories based on the cabinet files of the Tony Abbott prime ministership has angered and embarrassed senior Liberals, many of whom initially thought they were being leaked to damage the former prime minister.

Management of the massive security bungle has been given to the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C) and its head Martin Parkinson, who today released a statement on the matter.

“PM&C has instigated an investigation into the circumstances around the disposal of two Commonwealth Government filing cabinets that allegedly contained classified material,” said the statement.

“PM&C is working closely with the AFP and ASIO, and has been since the substantive release of Commonwealth documents by the ABC, around midday Wednesday 31 January 2018.

“PM&C have been in discussion continuously with the ABC since this time.

“Documents were secured in the early hours of this morning in Canberra and Brisbane, and this was the outcome of a co-operative arrangement between the ABC and the Australian Government – it was not a raid.

“The documents remain the property of the Commonwealth of Australia.”

The seriousness of the bungle hasn’t meant some people are not enjoying the nervousness of Liberals who fear their cabinet secrets could be made public.

Labor is one group relishing the discomfort, but Chris Bowen today insisted there were serious issues involved.

“This is a very serious breach of national security,” he told reporters today.

“And I think the government needs to hold a quick and thorough investigation into how this could possibly happen.

“This is embarrassing for the country. It’s embarrassing to our allies who share intelligence with us and assume we will be able to keep it.”

ASIO officers entered the Canberra and Brisbane offices of the ABC in an early morning operation to secure thousands of sensitive government cabinet documents.

About 1am this morning ASIO officers brought a safe to the ABC’s bureaus at Parliament House and Brisbane so the documents could be kept securely.

The trove, some classified “top secret”, was sold cheaply at a second-hand shop in Canberra, which stocked ex-government furniture.

The filing cabinets were unlocked with a drill months later. Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce said the person responsible for losing the documents will have serious questions to answer.

“Obviously someone’s had a shocker and the investigation will find out exactly how this happened,” he told ABC radio on Wednesday.

Cabinet papers are legally supposed to remain secret for 20 years after their production.

“In the process of running a country, there are things which go awry. This is one of them,” Mr Joyce said.

The ABC said it had chosen not to publish many of the documents because of their classified nature.

Mr Abbott said he believed a junior or mid-ranking departmental officer was to blame and insisted they “pay a price”.

“Not so much a cabinet leak as a leaked cabinet — that seems to be the problem,” Mr Abbott told 2GB radio.

Terry Moran, a former secretary of Prime Minister and Cabinet from 2008, called for the culprit to be identified and fired.

“Whoever was responsible for the selling a couple of the filing cabinets, which I think were locked, which must have been heavy with all the papers in them, without checking what was in the filing cabinets, apart from anything else they ought to be found and sacked,” Mr Moran told the ABC’s 7.30 program.