Australia’s top intelligence agency got ABC managing director Hugh Marks’ email wrong when it contacted the broadcaster with “grave concerns” it held about the second episode of a two-part Four Corners investigation into the Bondi massacre, he told a Senate committee on Tuesday.
ASIO took the unusual step of releasing a preemptive statement on Sunday night, critiquing the program and its sourcing after receiving a number of questions regarding a 2019 investigation into one of the attackers. But at a Senate estimates hearing on Tuesday afternoon, following the program’s airing on Monday night, Marks said there had been no further complaints.
“There’s been no orders about that. Obviously, ASIO released a very strong statement about that particular program – they wrote to me. They didn’t seek to call me or contact me. They did get my email address wrong,” Marks said.
“I think the program stood up for itself. It was transparent. It raised matters simply in a way that I think warranted further discussion, particularly at a royal commission. We can all assess the program on its own merits.
“I think the program was transparent about where we were one source or not. It was transparent about the various points of contact and what were reasonable decisions at the time. I thought the program stood up very well on a transparent basis,” Marks said.
ASIO claimed the ABC had relied in part on an “unreliable and disgruntled” source who had misidentified one of the alleged gunmen, 24-year-old Naveed Akram, and confused some of his actions before the attack with things done by someone else.
But Marks said some of the concerns flagged by ASIO, such as the broadcaster’s reliance on one source, and where some of the source’s statements could not be independently verified, were made clear to the audience in the airing of the program.
“Sometimes our job in media is just to raise things of concern, to point to areas that people should look at, to point to things that we think warrant further investigation, not necessarily to draw a final conclusion,” Marks said, in response to questions from Liberal senator Sarah Henderson.
Henderson also suggested that another source featured in the program, former intelligence officer Neil Fergus, could be considered disgruntled since he was previously raided by the security agency in 2024 in relation to his past appearances on Four Corners.
But ABC editorial director Gavin Fang said that the ABC program had “reasonably disclosed” that Fergus had an issue with ASIO.
“We’ve also provided the opportunity for ASIO, for example, to respond to the variety of different allegations that have been made in the program.”
Despite asking four questions about the documentary, Henderson conceded that she had not seen the program in question.
“It’s a great program. I urge you to watch it,” Fang said.
On Monday, the ABC released a statement standing by the story, which it said used extensive reporting and numerous sources to examine the actions of Akram and his father, Sajid Akram, before the events of December 14.
Akram has been charged with murdering 15 people in the December 14 attack, in which his father and alleged co-conspirator Sajid Akram was shot dead by police.
The program was viewed by an average audience of 511,000 people nationally across broadcast and live-streaming, according to the VOZ ratings report.
In further questions to Fang, Henderson accused star ABC journalists John Lyons, Laura Tingle and Sarah Ferguson of engaging in “political activism” by withdrawing from the Adelaide Writers’ Week after the festival’s board removed Palestinian-Australian writer Randa Abdel-Fattah. The event was cancelled after hundreds of speakers pulled out following Abdel-Fattah’s axing.
“I disagree that somebody not commenting, or somebody making a comment on social media where they’ve said they are withdrawing, indicates that they have taken a position supporting the comments of Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah. I just simply do not think that that inference is accurate,” Fang said.
“In this particular case, those reporters have not provided in those public statements any motivation for why they choose to withdraw and so it’s not, it’s not possible to infer, just from their public statements,” he said.
Marks said that Ferguson’s social media posts flagged by Henderson did not express support for Abdel-Fattah’s position on the war in the Middle East, but was instead concerned with issues around freedom of expression.
“Surely principles of freedom of speech, interference, political interference and creative debate – these are principles that journalists are entitled to stand up for,” he said.
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Calum Jaspan is a media writer for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, based in Melbourne. Reach him securely on Signal @calumjaspan.10Connect via X or email.
Kishor Napier-Raman is a senior business writer for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. Previously he worked as a CBD columnist and reporter in the federal parliamentary press gallery.Connect via X or email.