This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

The head of Australia’s spy agency has issued an extraordinary rebuke for the leak of departmental advice on the medevac bill to the Australian newspaper and misrepresentation of the advice as from Asio.

At the height of parliamentary debate on the medevac bill, the Australian published leaked advice on 7 February which it suggested concluded the bill would effectively dismantle offshore detention, boosting the Coalition’s ultimately unsuccessful case to block it.

The Asio director general, Duncan Lewis, began his evidence to the legal and constitutional affairs estimates committee on Monday with a statement assuring senators the spy agency does not influence national debates with “unauthorised disclosures”.

Lewis said the breakdown of controls on how Asio advice is disseminated is “seriously damaging”. “When reporting wrongly attributes advice from Asio or our classified advice is leaked it undermines all that we stand for.”

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Lewis said he had checked that there was no leak from Asio. “I hope I made it plain in my opening remarks that the advice that Asio gave was not what was represented on the front page of the Australian newspaper,” he said.

The home affairs department secretary, Michael Pezzullo, defended the Australian by noting that although the headline had characterised it as “Asio advice” the body of the article described it as a “briefing from the department of home affairs, based on advice from Asio and Australian Border Force”.

“If you read down the column it was transparently apparent it was from the department and drew on, in part, advice from Asio.”

Lewis said that Asio gave advice that was “narrow” in scope, relating only to the Asio Act and how it related to the Senate version of the medevac bill. “If the Australian has gone beyond that, then that is not correct,” he said.

The Senate bill gave the home affairs minister a window of just 24 hours to use national security grounds to override an independent medical board’s decision to transfer an asylum seeker out of offshore detention.

The final bill, with Labor amendments, allowed a 72-hour window and widened the grounds for the minister to block the transfer of people with a criminal record.

Pezzullo also stressed that the briefings given to Labor and the government were based only on the Senate bill, not the version with Labor’s amendments that passed both houses.

The home affairs department has referred the leak of its advice to the Australian federal police for criminal investigation.

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Pezzullo said the story had been written by Simon Benson, a “senior and distinguished writer” who is “very careful on how he sources information”.

Pezzullo said it appeared the advice had been paraphrased to Benson or “potentially he had sighted the document” which was “of more concern”.

The referral was motivated by concern that the leak may be an offence and a desire to clarify that Asio was “beyond question” and not involved in day-to-day politics, he said.

Lewis expressed “unease” at the circumstances of the leak. “It’s not a good place to be.”

The Labor senator Kim Carr said the fact of the classified document appearing on the front page of the Australian was a “highly offensive act”.

The Liberal senator Linda Reynolds intervened to clarify that it could not be characterised as a leak as it was “yet to be proven”.

Under questioning from the Liberal senator Jane Hume, Lewis refused to adopt her characterisation of the bill as “unworkable” but agreed that full background checks could “sometimes” take months, in some circumstances.