The Australian government has spent a further $250,000 on legal bills since dropping the prosecution of Bernard Collaery. 

Mr Collaery, a lawyer, and his former client, Witness K, an intelligence officer, were charged for their role in exposing the bugging of Timor-Leste government offices in 2004. 

Spies were used to influence sensitive commercial negotiations to carve up oil and gas reserves in the Timor Sea, which a collection of corporates, led by Woodside, were seeking to exploit.

The prosecution was rabidly pursued by the former Coalition government but Australia’s new attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, intervened to end it in July.

That decision was widely welcomed by lawyers, human rights advocates and Mr Collaery’s supporters.

Despite that, the government has been maintaining a push initiated by the Coalition to have parts of the Collaery proceedings suppressed from public view.

The current Labor government argues that a key judgement in the case should not be published without redactions necessary to protect national security.

It is unclear how much the push for secrecy has cost taxpayers. However, the attorney-general’s department admits the legal bill for the Collaery and Witness K cases was $5.148 million on the day Mr Dreyfus ended it, and has grown by $248,000 in the three months to October.

The government is fighting to suppress a ruling made by the ACT court of appeal last year, which said Mr Collaery’s trial should not take place in secret, as it would pose a “very real risk of damage to public confidence”.

However, the court was left unable to publish its full reasons for making the decision because of an intervention by the then Coalition government, which argued that publishing the decision would release sensitive information to the public and undermine Australia’s national security.