Immigration's 'nothing to hide call' in withholding Manus documents open to conjecture
I had a cameo in ABC Lateline's story last Thursday on the release of a 68-page document obtained under freedom of information concerning the alleged rape of a Papua New Guinean woman by three Australian security guards in July last year. The reporter Jason Om has written the story here. ABC: Brigid Andersen The most important issue of course is the incident, the allegation and the decision of the Australian government contractor to whisk the three alleged perpetrators out of PNG as quickly as possible. The Freedom of Information issue is that Immigration and Border Protection took six months to process the application for reports of the incident and ended up redacting just about everything the documents contained. All the pages (at the end of Jason Om's report), most completely blank, are marked s 22 (irrelevant material), s 33 (would or could reasonably be expected to damage international relations) and 47F (unreasonable disclosure of personal information and disc...