This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

The prime minister’s department has admitted that it lost the confidential files that ended up in a secondhand shop in Canberra.

ABC agrees to return secret documents found in old filing cabinets Read more

Days after the contents of the files were splashed all over the media, Martin Parkinson, the head of the department, issued a statement confessing that his office had been responsible.

The mistake “casts the department in a poor light and this failure has implications for the rest of the Australian public service”.

“It is now reasonably evident that the cabinets and documents which are the subject of the AFP investigation, came from the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet,” Parkinson said.

“While it remains unclear, it is likely this occurred some time ago.”

The documents, which the ABC has dubbed The Cabinet Files, were found in two locked filing cabinets sold at an ex-government sale in Canberra and span nearly a decade.

The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet on Wednesday announced an urgent investigation into the leak. Almost all of the files were classified, some as “top secret” or “AUSTEO”, which means they are to be seen by Australian eyes only.

Asio officers secured the documents in a safe on ABC premises on Thursday after the papers were retrieved from Canberra, Melbourne and Brisbane.

The ABC agreed to return the sensitive documents that were meant to remain secret for at least another decade. The broadcaster said it had chosen not to publish many of the documents because of their classified nature.

The documents detail a number of security breaches including the results of an audit showing that the Australian federal police lost nearly 400 national security files between 2008 and 2013, while Labor was in government. The documents lost by the AFP were from cabinet’s national security committee, which controls Australia’s security, intelligence and defence agenda, deploys the military and approves kill, capture or destroy missions.

The files also reveal that nearly 200 top-secret, codeword-protected and sensitive documents were left in the office of minister Penny Wong when Labor lost the 2013 election. The 195 documents included plans to protect the United Arab Emirates from Iranian hostilities, national security briefs, Afghan war updates, intelligence on Australia’s neighbours, profiles of terrorism suspects and issues around Australian defence force operations in Afghanistan.

The documents also included legal advice from the Australian government solicitor which shows it strongly counselled the former prime minister Tony Abbott not to break the longstanding convention of confidentiality and release cabinet documents from the Rudd government to the royal commission into home insulation.

Abbott ignored the advice of the AGS, and that of his own department.

Play Video 0:55 Top-secret files found in old filing cabinet – video

Draft legislation contained in the files also shows that the News Corp columnist Andrew Bolt, who breached section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, was consulted when the federal government moved to change the clause.

Bolt denies he was consulted on changes to the act. “I was not consulted but was once told what had been decided,” he told the ABC.

The ABC’s documents reveal that in late 2013 the then immigration minister, Scott Morrison, agreed his department should intervene in Asio security checks to try to prevent asylum seekers from being granted permanent protection visas.

The files also show that Abbott’s budget “razor gang” considered banning anyone under 30 from accessing income support before the 2014 budget. The options included cutting off under-30s from income support entirely, cutting off under-30s in areas with employment opportunities and limiting income support to young people with a work history.