In early June, authorities raided the home of News Corp. journalist Annika Smethurst and the offices of the Australian Broadcasting Corp. (ABC), the country’s public broadcaster.

The raids appeared to be part of an effort to identify journalists’ sources behind multiple sensitive stories. One of the media investigations had revealed plans to extend Australian authorities’ spying powers. Another series exposed allegedly unlawful killings by Australian forces in Afghanistan. The raids could still result in the prosecution of three journalists.

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Australia ranked far above the United States and Britain in the Press Freedom Index this year, published before the raids occurred. But without a constitutional protection for freedom of speech in Australia, top editors have grown increasingly concerned that authorities could abuse expansive national security legislation to suppress uncomfortable revelations or pressure media outlets.

“Australia is at risk of becoming the world’s most secretive democracy,” David Anderson, the managing director of ABC, said in a statement.

Among the media outlets and corporations that support Monday’s press freedom initiative, branded as the “Right to Know Coalition,” are News Corp., ABC, the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), the Guardian and Nine.

One of Nine’s newspapers, the Sydney Morning Herald, specified that the initiative aimed to protect whistleblowers, restrict government secrecy and expand freedom-of-information laws. The coalition also wants to force the government to exempt journalists from national security prosecutions, to overhaul defamation laws and to provide journalists with a “right to contest search warrants.”

Michael Miller, the executive chairman of News Corp. Australasia, wrote in a commentary for the Australian newspaper: “For years, governments, courts and public authorities have been building a great wall to keep much of what they do a ­secret and using legislation to make it a criminal offence for media to tell you.”

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Miller pointed to more than 70 pieces of legislation introduced since Sept. 11, 2001, that he said “have created roadblocks to stop you finding out what’s going on in this country.”

Australia has more national security laws than any other country, legal researcher Rebecca Ananian-Welsh wrote in a commentary in June.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison defended those laws Sunday, saying his conservative government believed “in the freedom of the press,” but also “in the rule of law and that no one is above it, including me, or anyone else, any journalist or anyone else.”

Efforts by consecutive Australian governments to expand national security laws have not always been publicly scrutinized to the extent they are now.

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In 2014, after Parliament had just approved another round of national security legislation, lawyer Michael Bradley cautioned in an ABC op-ed that despite the “major loss of press freedom” that would result, the laws had been passed “almost without protest, even from the media itself.”

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“Pity the country that gives up the freedom of its press as lightly as we are about to do,” Bradley wrote in 2014, predicting a scenario similar to the raids this summer that triggered Monday’s campaign to reverse some of those changes.