The Attorney-General is expected to redraft a proposed suite of tough new national security and secrecy laws to give journalists a court defence when reporting government secrets which are in the "public interest".
The treason laws are expected to be softened slightly for government employees who leak classified information, with a crime only occurring if they release information that was “inherently dangerous” and risks “harm to Australia’s national interest”.
Journalists will get an extra defence that will shield them in secrecy trails if they can prove they “reasonably believed” they published the sensitive information in the “public interest”.
But he warned organisations like Wikileaks dumping large caches of unfiltered documents in the name of "radical transparency" could still risk falling foul of the law if they published dangerous information.
"It can never be in the public interest to do something that endangers the lives of Australians, or the lives of intelligence officers,” Mr Porter told reporters at Parliament House on Thursday.
"The criticisms that are made of Julian Assange and organisations like Wikileaks is without scrutinising individual documents and simply publishing them all at once, sometimes thousands of them, they’ve done things that have put lives at risk, and that is what this legislation seeks to avoid,” he said.
SBS News asked Mr Porter whether the protections would extend to bloggers and individuals sharing information on social media.
He said the term “journalist” would not be strictly defined and would be left to court interpretation, but was likely to extend to bloggers in many cases.
The actual revised wording of the bill has not yet been released, but will likely be tabled in parliament in the coming weeks.
A previous requirement for journalists to demonstrate their reporting was "fair and accurate" will be scratched from the law.
