Hundreds of pages of cabinet documents, some of them marked secret, others with an even more restricted circulation, are handed over to the ABC. It’s the kind of information journalists can normally only dream about, a cornucopia of documents dealing with high level national security and an insight into the internal workings of government over six administrations. But what emerges from this treasure trove of 1,500 documents? A few interesting, but mainly rather ordinary stories.

So what happened to the material that many journalists spend so much of their lives trying to discover – documents involving national security? On 1 February, the ABC news director, Gaven Morris, explained all on the network’s AM program: “We haven’t gone anywhere near, you know, stories or issues that may have a national security implication.”

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Yet there are few other more important issues than how governments use national security as a blanket to cover up for their failures and deceptions. As the US investigative journalist IF Stone famously said: “All governments lie.”

It’s the role of a journalist to uncover the deception and misrepresentations, and what greater gift could you have than a filing cabinet full of classified government documents?

In an organisation already jittery following the assault from Tony Abbott that it was un-Australian in the way it reported the refugee crisis and Australia’s role in supporting US spying on the region, Morris’s statement sent a clear message: there will be no more investigative journalism at the ABC of national security matters which are not officially sanctioned by the government.

“We could have told hundreds of stories over weeks or months,” Morris said. “Instead we chose to be selective and responsible in what we broadcast.”

The fact that there are good investigative journalists inside the ABC who will actively work against this directive, is testament to the fact that they have a better understanding of the role of the fourth estate in holding executive government to account, than the person who leads them.

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When gifted a large cache of secret documents, the normal journalistic process would involve the stories being written, with names and operational details removed. The reports would then either be published outright, or the government approached for comment, running the risk that they may seek an injunction to prevent publication. Whatever the process, not even completing the journalistic work in the first place is a strange way for the ABC to discharge its journalistic responsibility.

Even stranger still is the way the ABC allowed Asio to bring safes into the ABC buildings, supposedly so the documents could be kept secure and then taken away.

Handing over documents to any Australian intelligence agency signals the emergence of an unhealthy relationship between the ABC and the very institutions of government they should be holding to account. Yet it wasn’t always so.

In the 1990s when a series of reports on Four Corners and other ABC programs exposed some of the questionable activities of Australia’s overseas spy agency, ASIS (Australian Secret Intelligence Service), the then managing director, David Hill, himself a former journalist, played hard ball, telling a subsequent government inquiry into the affair that the ABC would “oppose any further restrictions on the reporting of ASIS, whatever form that may take”.

John Lyons, the ABC’s head of investigations, who operates under Morris, seemed to put some distance between himself and the decision to steer clear of national security stories.

Lyons, who had a reputation as a fearless reporter on national security issues, wrote in a curious article in his former newspaper, the Australian: “Once the decision had been taken to publish only documents of public interest rather than those that included sensitive operational matters, the roll-out was planned”.

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In the article Lyons shifted the focus of the reporting onto how the government had suffered a major breach of national security. But in doing so he inexplicably provided significant details about the person who was the source of the documents, information which could easily disclose his identity.

Whatever the truth about what went on in the ABC’s decision making process, the outcome of the way the story was handled should serve as a warning. History tells us what can happen to organisations that get too close to governments.

Edward Snowden decided not to give his important cache of documents to the New York Times because they had caved into White House pressure and covered up the NSA’s spying program against American citizens after 9/11.

Instead he handed it to journalist Glenn Greenwald and the scoop ended up in the Guardian. One of the biggest cabinet leaks in Australian history could have covered the ABC in journalistic glory. Instead it has posed questions about how the organisation’s leadership sees its role in holding governments to account on important matters of national security.