The D-Notice System and the Question of Trust
A series of Australian Federal Police (AFP) raids on Australian journalists in 2019 stimulated numerous reviews into press freedom and the impact of Australia’s secrecy laws on public interest journalism. One of the proposals that was subsequently put forward by the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security in 2020 with a view to ensuring journalists could investigate classified information “without the threat of investigation or prosecution” called for the reintroduction of elements of the long-abandoned Defence-Notice or D-Notice system. The D-Notice system was a voluntary press censorship scheme that was introduced in Australia in 1952 after years of sustained pressure from both the US and UK governments to increase Australia’s security and press control measures. Melanie Brand, who has been researching secrecy in Cold War Australia for her PhD in History, tells us more about Australia’s D-Notice system and its history.
By 1947, top secret Allied signals intelligence had confirmed the existence of Soviet espionage in Australia. As a result, both the US and UK governments feared for the security of any classified information or technology shared with Australia. With a view to restoring secrecy and enhancing security, the British Government urged its Australian counterpart to introduce both a new intelligence agency along the lines of MI5 and a mechanism for press censorship similar to the D-Notice system in operation in the UK. The Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) was established in 1948 with MI5 assistance, but the Chifley Labor government (1945–1949) remained resistant to the ‘principle and procedure’ of press censorship during the final years of their government.
Chifley’s successor, conservative Prime Minister Robert Menzies (1949–1966), was far more enthusiastic regarding the idea of a scheme of voluntary press censorship. Within his first year in office, Menzies secured in-principle agreement to a D-Notice scheme from representatives of 18 leading Australian press associations and media organisations, including the Australian Newspapers Council, the Australian Federation of Commercial Broadcasting Stations and the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC). The D-Notice system was then formally established in 1952.
The Menzies Government was guided heavily by the British government when formulating the Australian system, which had a similar structure and functions to the British model and operated on similar principles. When a program, agency, or new defence technology was deemed worthy of censorship, a so-called ‘D-Notice’ was issued for it. Each D-Notice was agreed upon and confirmed by a committee – the Defence, Press and Broadcasting Committee – that consisted of the head of each of the major media outlets and associations as well as representatives from the government and defence services. By design, representatives of the press outnumbered those of the government, and those D-Notices that were accepted were “strictly limited to matters of national security“. The Committee was headed by a secretary, who was to act as an independent broker between government representatives and the press.
The existence of the D-Notice system itself was highly classified, as were the individual notices. For this reason, knowledge of the D-Notice scheme was strictly limited to the highest levels of government and the defence forces. Notices were issued only to the senior executives of each masthead or organisation, never to the editorial staff or journalists. While the individual D-Notices changed periodically over the three decades that the system was in operation, the principles guiding the scheme did not.
For many years the co-operation promised by the D-Notice system in Australia was as stable as the Prime Ministership of Menzies himself. The Committee was designed to meet infrequently: only those notices which represented a departure from established practice or where there was some disagreement about the proposed draft of the notice required a meeting and, during the first decade of its operation, the Committee convened only a handful of times.
Yet while the D-Notice system remained stable in the early to mid-1960s, the same could not be said of Australian society, which was undergoing a period of rapid and dramatic political change. The rise of movements calling for women’s rights and aboriginal rights, and the peace movement, including anti-Vietnam demonstrations, were growing in popularity and influence. At the same time, the heavy-handed and clumsy attempts of Australia’s domestic intelligence organisation, ASIO (Australian Security Intelligence Organisation), to monitor and suppress ‘subversive’ activities caused increasing unease and distrust towards intelligence services within significant sections of the Australian population.
Political scandals and rumours swirled around ASIO during the late 1960s; all were met with government silence and an insistence that government ministers could not comment on national security matters. Journalists became increasingly suspicious that secrecy was being used for political purposes, to cover up embarrassing episodes or to promote the political views of the government. These suspicions were exacerbated by the rise of détente and the fading threat posed by the Cold War in the early years of the 1970s: government appeals to ‘national security’ in the name of fighting communism were losing their resonance.
It was in this environment that the journalist Richard Farmer revealed the existence of the Australian D-Notice system in Nation magazine – a publication that had no direct involvement with the D-Notice Committee – in July of 1967. When rumours began to circulate that the D-Notice Committee had smothered a story due for publication in the Australian, then Prime Minister Harold Holt was forced to confirm the existence of the secret D-Notice system, though he refused to reveal specific details, again claiming that it was not in the national interest to do so.
This revelation of the D-Notice system was the beginning of a series of breaches of the system. The continued revelations of heretofore secret intelligence agencies in Australia, notably the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) and the Defence Signals Division (DSD), combined with a series of US intelligence-related scandals concerning the FBI and the CIA-fuelled community concern about the excessive secrecy and possible abuse of power in the Australian system. The Australian public soon developed a strong appetite for information on the country’s secret intelligence infrastructure. The press was more than happy to feed this appetite, especially as it coincided with a boom in investigative journalism.
In 1972, the Daily Telegraph confirmed the existence of Australia’s foreign intelligence agency, ASIS, and all major press and television outlets followed the story. The following year, the Fairfax-owned National Times published details on the operations of Australia’s signals intelligence agency, then known as the Defence Signals Bureau (DSD). Although Fairfax was a participant in the D-Notice Committee, appeals to the Notice covering the DSD held little persuasive power given the existence of the agency had been revealed by Ramparts magazine in the United States the previous year. If the existence of the agency was already known by Australia’s adversaries, the claim that the D-Notice system protected ‘national security’ was questionable; it seemed designed to keep Australians – and not their enemies – in the dark.
In response to the changing external environment, a review of the D-Notice system was undertaken in 1973. The review determined that the number of topics covered by D-Notices should be reduced from seven to four; and that these should be unclassified and distributed more widely to media outlets and newsrooms to better ensure knowledge of, and compliance with, the system. In 1975, a Defence Department report stated that the 1973 reforms had helped shore up the system: “The system now operates with considerably more cohesion, understanding and efficiency”, the Department observed. “Where government departments have been able to show convincingly that national security interests are at stake in the issue of a Notice”, the report continued, “the great majority of the media have co-operated”.
Nonetheless, by 1977 the members of the Fraser Government began to suspect that some media representatives “had developed strong views in opposition to the present D Notice arrangements”, and the Department of Defence warned that there were “certain people who might wish to overturn the D Notice system”. The following year, the Nation Review of 9–15 February reported that the Australian Journalists Association was “considering full opposition to the ‘D’ notices cabal between press and government” — an apparent confirmation of government suspicions.
The relationship deteriorated further in 1979 when the Fraser Government announced a package of legislation to strengthen Australia’s intelligence community. The new measures included the imposition of fines or incarceration for the publication of information on ASIO or ASIO staff. From the perspective of modern-day Australia – with the AFP raids on ABC offices and the home of journalist Annika Smedhurst a fresh memory – such legislation seems standard, but it was not seen that way in 1979.
Many members of the Australian press were alarmed by the threat to free speech implied by this development. The Age, for example, argued that the legislation went “far beyond necessity, and imposes a severe limitation on the freedom of the press to report and the right of the public to know” (26 May). In the Sydney Morning Herald (1 May), Andrew Kruger drew attention to possible implications for ongoing co-operation between the press and the government: “The government recognizes the media’s roles and responsibilities under the D Notice system not to report certain subjects on defence and national security. Unless it carries this trust into the ASIO Bill”, he warned, “it could jeopardise the future of such voluntary censorship”.
The last official meeting of the Press and Broadcasting Committee was in 1982; thereafter, as most accounts would have it, the system “fell into disuse”. The demise of the system was almost certainly hastened by the 1983 Combe-Ivanov Affair, which served to highlight the widespread scepticism of the Australian media towards the claims of the Hawke government (1983–1991) that secrecy was justified on the basis of national security. During the subsequent Royal Commission, several key documents used as evidence were initially classified and were not made available to the public, David Combe, or his lawyer.
When this decision was reversed a few weeks into the Commission, and the documents were shown to Combe’s lawyer, journalist Michelle Grattan wryly observed that the documents in question in fact posed “no great danger to our national security … the nation remains safe” (Age, 4 July 1983). To many journalists, this demonstrated how slippery the concept of national security was, and how much it was used to suit government needs. With no trust that genuine matters of defence lay behind the secrecy invoked by the Government during the inquiry, the press perceived the “spectre of national security” (SMH 6 July 1983) as nothing more than a means to protect the government’s own reputation.
ASIS later argued that the D-Notice system “suffered from fundamental problems” and that relying on “voluntary media restraint” was “inadequate” because such restraint “no longer exists.” With no shared understanding between government, defence and intelligence agencies, and the media of what exactly constituted the “public interest”, ASIS felt the media too often equated the national interest with their own financial interests. Although a 1995 inquiry into ASIS recommended the D-Notice system be re-established, no concrete steps were taken and the system has not been successfully revived in the years since.
While the idea that the D-Notice system in Australia simply “fell into disuse” may be comforting to those who wish to revive it, it did not in fact simply undergo a slow process of decay. The D-Notice system is one that relies heavily on trust: the system is voluntary, and representatives of the media must be convinced that genuine matters of national security are at risk. When there is a suspicion that the system is used to cover political embarrassment or hide abuses of power, journalists will question the rationale behind the D-Notices and the very need for secrecy. If defence and intelligence services suspect self-interest has begun to supersede the ‘public interest’ on the part of the press, they will no longer be willing to give journalists the benefit of the doubt. This is what happened in Australia, and this is why the proposal to revive the system, if it does not sufficiently address the issue of trust, may also be doomed to fail.
Melanie Brand (@melaniebrand68) is an intelligence historian and Lecturer in Intelligence Studies at Macquarie University. She is currently completing a PhD at the University of Melbourne on secrecy in Cold War Australia. Her research interests include intelligence analysis and warning, oversight and accountability, and the relationship between intelligence and the media. Melanie’s research has been published in Cold War History and Intelligence and National Security.