CENTRAL Victorians flocked to the Bendigo Town Hall for a discussion about press freedom in Australia.
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The sold out Talking Justice event happened to fall on the same day the Federal Court dismissed a legal challenge mounted by the ABC regarding an AFP raid on its central Sydney head office last year.
The raid was in relation to reports published in 2017 about what the ABC described as "alleged unlawful killings and misconduct by Australian special forces in Afghanistan."
ABC managing director David Anderson said the ruling was "further evidence of the urgent need for explicit protections for public interest journalism and for whistleblowers."
Tonight's Talking Justice event in Bendigo further explored ideas around protections for a free press and its sources.
Former Bendigo journalist Annika Smethurst - whose home, computer and mobile phone were the subject of an unrelated AFP raid last year - was among the speakers.
"They haven't ruled out me being prosecuted and going to jail," Ms Smethurst said.
News Corp is challenging the validity of the AFP's search warrant in the High Court.
Ms Smethurst did not believe AFP raids deterred journalists from doing their jobs. However, she believed it had a "chilling effect on whistleblowers" and made it less likely for stories to come across a journalist's desk - a situation that presented "a real challenge".
She said her sources 'dried up' for a period of time after the raid, making it difficult for her to do her job.
It had taken a lot of effort to regain people's trust.
Ms Smethurst told M.C. Jon Faine, formerly of ABC Radio Melbourne, she still believed her phone was bugged.
"I moved house because we thought my house might be bugged," she said.
She had changed the way she went about gathering information, as a result.
A question from an audience member provided an insight into the raid's emotional toll.
"I never spent another night in that house," Ms Smethurst said.
For months afterwards she refused to answer the door.
Ms Smethurst said she burnt personal correspondence, like a card she had been keeping from her 21st birthday.
She said one of the worst aspects of the raid was when police read through documents that were never intended for anyone other than herself and the writer.
"They looked through page by page of everything. It's horrible how much of an invasion that is," Ms Smethurst said.
"It hasn't deterred me from journalism but it has made me very angry."
She and fellow speakers Richard Ackland, of The Saturday Paper, and Matthew Ricketson, of Deakin University, addressed some of the barriers traditional media faced in performing their function as the 'fourth estate'.
They included weakening financial models, which were reducing resourcing in newsrooms.
The arrival of 'new' media also meant traditional media had less power, though a show of hands indicated tonight's audience was still largely supportive of print and online publications.
The two-hour conversation canvassed government attacks on public broadcasting models, both in Australia and in Britain.
However, two out of the three speakers remained optimistic about the future of news media.
"You have to stay optimistic," Professor Ricketson said.
Ms Smethurst said people had been predicting the demise of news media since her first year of university.
"I think news will look different but the need for news will always be there," she said.
Mr Ackland was "reasonably pessimistic," believing the situation to be "very dire".
Tonight's Talking Justice event was the largest yet. The ARC Justice initiative started during Law Week in 2014. It has been delivered in partnership with Goldfields Libraries since 2018.
- with Australian Associated Press