Last Friday night, The Australian’s Cameron Stewart won the Gold Quill for outstanding journalism at the Melbourne Press Club’s annual Quill Awards dinner.

Among his peers, Stewart is a popular and well-respected journalist. His contacts within the national security establishment are formidable. And the story that won him the Gold Quill was undoubtedly a scoop. On the morning of August 4 last year, while the rest of the media were scrambling to cover the announcement that Federal and Victoria Police raids in the Melbourne suburbs had led to the arrest of five people for alleged terrorism offences, Stewart’s story on the front page of The Australian had impressive detail about the police operation and the plot it claimed to have uncovered.

But of course it was a controversial story. Media Watch covered it at the time, and again on Monday night.

There’s no need to go further here into the dispute between The Australian and the Victoria Police (the AFP’s position is much less clear) about when and how the story hit the streets, and whether The Australian broke the terms of an agreement, or endangered police lives, by publishing when they did.

As Media Watch noted on Monday, News Ltd has successfully applied for an interim injunction against the publication of a joint report by the Victorian Office of Police Integrity and the Australian Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity on the leak and its aftermath. If that injunction is lifted in three weeks’ time, we’ll know in detail what the police view is. No doubt The Australian will let us know its version.

But meanwhile, Cameron Stewart told the Melbourne Press Club, “What none of you know here is that it’s been a very, very difficult and ugly legal battle behind the scenes. The lack of shield laws for sources, and journalists, and everything in this country is an absolute disgrace.” (Applause)…

“But let me tell you that it is a real fight in this country for press freedom because it is a very ugly battle that we face and I hope that every single person in this room does what they can to stand up for it.”

Fighting words. And Cameron Stewart is right that the protection given by Australian law to legitimate whistleblowers, and to journalists who refuse to disclose confidential sources, is among the weakest in the English speaking world.

In the UK and New Zealand, and in many states in the USA, it is up to those who want to force a journalist to disclose a source – whether it be the police, or a criminal prosecutor, or a government department, or a company trying to identify a leaker on its staff – to prove that the public interest in disclosure outweighs the likely harm to the source, and the benefit the public derives from a media that sources can trust. Most states in Australia have no shield law at all. The Journalists Privilege Bill, now winding its tortuous way through the Federal Parliament, which the Rudd Government hopes will be adopted by every state, still leaves the burden on the journalist to convince a court that he shouldn’t be forced to disclose. That won’t be easy, in a country where judges have shown little inclination to favour freedom of the press – especially if they think it’s in conflict with the interests of the judicial system.

But journalists have a talent (don’t we all?) for painting their own motives and actions in the rosiest light.

The fact is, if Cameron Stewart thinks that in this particular case, there is a country in the world where a shield law would protect him, he’s right. But there aren’t many. He’d probably need to be in Germany or Austria, or a few (a very few) of the United States. Everywhere else – in New Zealand, in Canada, in the UK, in Europe, in most of the US, he wouldn’t have a prayer.

In Germany, the right of journalists not to reveal a confidential source is absolute. There is no consideration that can allow the courts, or anyone else, to force them to do so. But almost everywhere else, journalistic privilege is qualified. The courts, if not investigative bodies like the OPI, can demand that journalists reveal their sources, and punish them for refusing to do so, if the public interest demands it.

We don’t know for sure who the source was for Cameron Stewart’s story. But a Victorian policeman has been suspended, so it’s pretty clear who the OPI thinks is responsible. Let’s suppose it’s right.

Let’s suppose that the source was a detective who was involved in ‘Operation Neath’, the anti-terrorism investigation that culminated in the raids of August 4 last year. He was not revealing corruption, wrongdoing or incompetence on the part of the Victoria Police or the AFP. On the contrary, he was revealing that their investigation was about to bear fruit in the form of arrests.

Clearly, leaking this information to a journalist was, at the very least, in contravention of police regulations. It may well have constituted a crime. And it’s hard to see, even if Victoria had the most robust whistleblower protection in the world, which it certainly does not, how he could possibly claim to come under its protection.

When the information was leaked to Cameron Stewart, he took his information to the AFP. It seems they agreed to brief him so that he was fully informed, on condition that he did not publish until they gave the go-ahead. Some might think they had little choice. Others, more cynically, would argue that they were using him to get a version of events favourable to the AFP into the media, before Victoria Police could claim any credit.

Either way, there seems little doubt that the AFP – and presumably, however reluctantly, Victoria Police – agreed that The Australian could publish its story on the morning of the raids. The disagreement seems to be all about how early that news would be available. But it’s hard to believe, if there had been no leak in the first place, that either the AFP or Victoria Police would have chosen to have anyone publish anything until the targets were safely locked up.

The Victoria Police certainly claim that the late edition with the story on the front page was available in Melbourne around 1:00am, more than three hours before the raids. Chief Commissioner Simon Overland claims that that endangered the lives of the police doing the raids. Whether or not that’s an exaggeration, and even though the leaker was only indirectly responsible, it’s hard to see a judge ignoring the possibility.

It may well be argued that the very fact of the leak being revealed forced police to conduct the raids sooner than they otherwise would have done, with the result that their evidence against suspected terrorists is weaker than it might have been. After all, they couldn’t know who else the leaker might have talked to.

There’s an argument, too, that it is in the interests of national security that a leaker who imperilled an anti-terrorist investigation should be tracked down, put on trial, and punished, to deter others in the future.

All heavy-duty public interest arguments.

If Cameron Stewart’s evidence in court is deemed essential to securing that conviction, it’s hard to see any judge, even in a country with much stronger shield laws than Australia’s, finding that the public interest in freedom of the press outweighed the public interest in requiring him to identify his source. The plea that he and his newspaper acted responsibly with the information they were given wouldn’t necessarily sway a court. Its focus would be on ensuring that relevant evidence about the leaker was placed before it, not on what happened after the leak.

Of course, Stewart may not be faced with a choice. The police may decide against a criminal prosecution. If they decide to prosecute, the source may plead guilty. Or he may waive Stewart’s obligation to protect him. The police or the prosecution may decide that they have sufficient evidence without Stewart’s testimony, and that threatening a journalist of his stature with imprisonment isn’t a good look. But the treatment of Gerard McManus and Michael Harvey, who were convicted of contempt of court, and heavily fined, for protecting a source on a far less sensitive story, of much more obvious public interest, is not encouraging.

If Cameron Stewart promised his source confidentiality, he has no choice but to honour that promise. The Media Alliance Code of Ethics advises bluntly: “where confidences are accepted, respect them in all circumstances.”

I’ve argued on Media Watch that there is at least one circumstance in which a source’s identity does not need to be protected: if it becomes clear that the source has knowingly provided false information to a journalist, it’s arguable that he’s surrendered the right to confidentiality.

There’s no indication that any such thing has happened in this case. So Stewart will have to hope that an escape can be found, or at worst, face a criminal conviction, a substantial fine, or even imprisonment, for contempt of court.

But frankly, that was foreseeable, or should have been, when this information was accepted in confidence, and acted upon. To plead that in any other country with a legal system comparable to Australia’s, arguments about ‘the freedom of the press’, or shield laws, or whistleblower protection, would have allowed him to escape that predicament is, in this particular case, mere wishful thinking.

Note: For a simple, non-technical comparison of shield laws in countries with an English common law tradition, I recommend this paper by Lorraine Ingham. Though it doesn’t deal with the bill currently before Federal Parliament.

Jonathan Holmes presents ABC TV’s Media Watch.