By Bianca Hall and Edmund Tadros Senior Defence brass opposed the Department of Immigration and Citizenship’s bid to use the remote Scherger RAAF base as a detention centre, documents released under freedom of information show. Defence refused to release more than half the pages in the heavily redacted package of…
ADFA’s decade of sex claims
By Edmund Tadros and Markus Mannheim Australia’s military university has filed at least 29 formal reports of alleged sexual offences over the past decade, including claims a female cadet was king-hit and raped while unconscious. But the records, obtained under freedom of information law, may represent a mere fraction of…
APEC 2007 – Truth revealed by Freedom-of-Infomation
I covered the protester aspect of the 2007 Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) summit in Sydney for the Sydney Morning Herald. Using direct reporting and a series of Freedom-of-Information requests I found that police were forced to make a payout for wrongly arresting a protester, spent $2 million on a…
Prison Guards rob and bully: report
DOZENS of prison officers committed criminal offences last year, including bashing inmates, assaulting and bullying co-workers and stealing, according to a confidential Corrective Services report. The department held 162 misconduct hearings into staff between last January and June and found enough evidence to warrant disciplinary or further action in 65…
NSW Police, a big group of teenagers and the ensuing riot
Catalogue of police blunders at party that was broken up Police tried to suppress details of their baton-wielding reaction to a teen dance event, but freedom-of-information laws have exposed the embarrassing details. Read more… I’ve had mixed results with freedom-of-information laws. On this ocassion I was able to get a…