Home affairs head says there is a ‘trusted dialogue’ with some reporters over stories involving classified information

The home affairs department’s secretary, Mike Pezzullo, has defended his agency’s refusal to disclose how many warrants have been issued against journalists while revealing he has a small group of trusted journalists he engages with when they are reporting on highly sensitive leaks.

The joint standing committee on intelligence and security had asked the department how many search warrants, surveillance devices and computer access warrants had been sought by state and territory police in relation to journalists.

As Guardian Australia reported on Friday, the department declined to provide those statistics.

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Pezzullo told the committee on Friday that he could not “change gravity”, because warrants were not broken down into categories of what job the person the warrant was issued against held.

He said there needed to be a “trusted dialogue” between the department and media for negotiating ahead of publication of leaked information.

“This does happen, and I want to assure the committee stories are published, both in the criminal space, in the terror space, and indeed in other areas whereby through sensible, mature, quiet negotiations … stories are either held, certain details that could lead to somebody being killed … their identity is veiled, and there is a process of negotiation that is not censorship,” he said.

He said journalists in the national security and defence rounds tended to take this approach, and there were potentially “fewer than two dozen” who were considered trusted in the security and defence field, which he put down to the disruption in the media industry and the reduction in specialised beat reporting where journalists can become experts in their field.

“The industry has gone through major disruption,” he said.

“There are about two dozen people who have the judgment, the depth, the scale of knowledge, who have got the wit, and the sensibility to come forward and say ‘Look I’m going to run this yarn whether you like it or not. Let’s talk about whether it can be done safely.’ ”

He said he did not leak classified information to those trusted journalists, and said that leakers of classified government documents should “face the full force of the law”.

Earlier in the hearing, the AFP deputy commissioner, Neil Gaughan, defended the agency’s decision not to investigate who leaked then-classified advice from Asio regarding the potential impact of the medevac legislation on national security.

A Guardian Australia freedom of information request revealed in July that just 11 people, including the home affairs minister, Peter Dutton, and Pezzullo had been sent the final document, but the case was still dropped.

Gaughan argued that more than 200 people had access to some parts of the draft or the final document.

“The information in the papers could have come from the draft or from the final document. We never accepted the matter for investigation. We have been very clear on that.”

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Labor’s spokeswoman on home affairs, Kristina Keneally, said it pointed to a double standard because the AFP raided Annika Smethurst’s home over a story that the government did not like, while Simon Benson’s medevac story, which favoured the government’s position, did not even lead to a phone call to Benson.

“Each case is unique in its own right, and there are complexities and differences in each matter,” said the acting AFP commissioner, Karl Kent.

Gaughan also revealed that after the privileges committee questioned the AFP over informing Dutton’s office before raiding the home affairs department over the au pairs leak, the AFP had decided to no longer inform the minister’s office in advance of raids, which is why Dutton was not informed of the ABC or Smethurst raids.

In responses to questions on notice, the AFP also confirmed that there was no journalist information warrant issued to access Smethurst’s metadata, but said it was confidential information as to whether warrants had been issued on ABC journalists over their leaks, or Lisa Martin over the au pairs story.