Labor will examine any legislative proposals to protect press freedom in Australia, it’s deputy leader says, with the storm surrounding last week’s police raids on journalists showing no signs of abating.

Labor has defended its role in helping to pass national security legislation which curtailed media freedoms and protections for whistleblowers in the past two terms of Coalition government, with the opposition sensitive to any criticism it was “soft” on the issue.

But Richard Marles said Labor consistently attempted to add safeguards to the government’s legislation, to ensure public interest journalism and those who contributed to it were protected, adding the government was distancing itself from the “extraordinary” scenes of last week.

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“At every moment along the way, we have been the proponents and responsible for amendments which go to the question of there being national interest tests which protect the freedom of the press,” he told the ABC’s Insiders program on Sunday morning.

“That’s actually our form over the last few years. We will have a look at whatever the government put before us in terms of propositions here. But the starting point is they’ve actually got to come out and make it clear that, as a government, they support the idea of the freedom of the press. And right now, we haven’t even heard that.

Marles defended Mark Dreyfus, in his role of shadow attorney general, writing to the government demanding an investigation into the leak which formed the basis of Smethurst’s story, as “pointing out the chaos of the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government and the fact they were leaking like a sieve”.

“And they needed to get their house in order,” he said.

“The idea that the remedy of that is to then go and shake down a press gallery with the federal police is ridiculous. The government needs to get its house in order in terms of how it manages information. That’s not a question then about stopping the media from doing its job, and that completely crosses the line.”

Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton have both distanced themselves from the AFP raids, which saw the News Corp Sundays political editor, Annika Smethurst, targeted at her home for stories she wrote more than a year ago, and the ABC raided over a story from two years ago, for which an alleged whistleblower has already been charged.

In the days following the raids, it was revealed the AFP advised it was not looking for conversations which involved politicians while Smethurst’s home was raided, while the AFP also acknowledged it had dropped the investigation into the politically advantageous leak into security agency advice into the medevac laws the Coalition opposed.

The final Senate makeup is yet to be decided, but the Centre Aliance senator Rex Patrick said if, as expected, his party’s two votes form part of the balance of power, he would expect further protections for media freedom to be seriously considered.

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Speaking to Sky News, Patrick, who has previously argued for more protection for whistleblowers, said a free media should form part of Australia’s constitution.

The first amendment of the US constitution protects both freedom of speech and the media and has stood as an inalienable defence against attempts to discourage journalists from investigating those in power.

“Rather than perhaps go back and adjust every single one of [the laws], if we had, as we should have, a provision in our constitution that protects freedom of the press, it would change the lens through which those laws were interpreted and, indeed, may make some of them completely invalid,” he told Sky News.

Any changes to the constitution require a referendum. Patrick said he believed the issue to be “urgent and pressing” and worth consideration.