Commonwealth of Australia January to June 2018

Abstract

The year did not begin at all benignly for the beleaguered Turnbull government. No sooner had ministers returned to work, when the ABC released a series of top‐secret Cabinet files, which had been locked in two filing cabinets and sent by the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C) to a government furniture disposal store at Fyshwick before being bought and eventually opened and read by the new purchaser. Journalists had been negotiating with the buyer to get copies of the 1,500 confidential files, and then began selectively releasing stories which they thought “newsworthy” because they contained material that would be politically damaging and cause embarrassment to government. The leaked files contained thousands of pages involving five government departments over a decade and was described as “one of the biggest breaches in cabinet security in Australian history”.