Upon publication of this second story, Killen denounced Toohey in parliament. He accused Toohey and the Financial Review of issuing an open invitation to terrorists to help themselves to the dangerous material at Maralinga, and of reporting falsehoods. He said, ‘It is a day for regret when a journalist and a newspaper, aided by a criminal act, have published a story that is against the interest of the nation and its people’. Killen’s outburst in parliament was reported in the stablemate Fairfax broadsheet the Sydney Morning Herald on 12 October 1978:
[Killen] said a report in the Financial Review ‘written by one of that paper’s employees’ has stated that he suggested there might be no need to do anything other than upgrade the police guard at Maralinga. ‘I said no such thing and suggested no such thing’, Mr Killen said… ‘This is a pernicious, wicked and odious technique that has long been practised by this man’, Mr Killen said… ‘The person concerned with the report wouldn’t be capable of accurately reporting a minute’s silence’, Mr Killen said.
Killen claimed that the Defence submission did not make assertions about an immediate terrorist threat, although one could conceivably exist if no action were taken, and that publicising this threat ‘was an act of irresponsibility’. Toohey took the attack in his stride: ‘I knew that I had accurately reported Killen’s cabinet submission, despite his flamboyant, often incomprehensible, accusations against me. Perhaps his reaction reflected the way he was unaccustomed to media criticism’. When he was interviewed in 1987, Toohey nominated his Maralinga plutonium story as a career highlight:
Jim Killen went berserk when [the discrete mass of plutonium] was revealed and he banned the paper from any contact whatsoever with the Defence Department. [Malcolm] Fraser ordered him to lift the ban, but what Killen went ape about was the story being a breach of security. My point was that the real security problem lay in leaving unguarded plutonium at Maralinga.
While the drama around Brian Toohey’s plutonium disclosure was unfolding, the legendary denizen of the Canberra press gallery Mungo MacCallum watched with wry amusement. MacCallum, a colourful satirist and political correspondent, spent 20 years in the federal parliamentary press gallery. His column ‘From the gallery’ of 12 October 1978, titled ‘Killen throws a Maralinga bomb – with fallout’, chronicled Killen’s lambasting of Toohey:
Mr Killen exploded in the megaton range, and scattered his fallout widely – especially over this paper’s Canberra correspondent, Mr Brian Toohey. Mr Killen never actually named Mr Toohey; however, in a series of answers to questions, and in a ministerial statement designed to clear up the whole issue, he left no doubt as to his primary target.
MacCallum recounted how Opposition leader Bill Hayden revealed that he had contacted Whitlam, and the two Whitlam government Defence ministers, Lance Barnard and Bill Morrison, who had said they did not recall hearing about plutonium buried at Maralinga. Killen countered this with the fact that the still-classified Pearce Report, which noted the Maralinga plutonium, had been available to them when they were in government. This was possibly a self-defeating point to make, given Killen had also expressed ignorance about the Maralinga plutonium before 1977 when he, too, had access to the report. MacCallum said that Killen, having savaged Toohey, ‘sat down to a big laugh and a round of applause’.
Toohey prepared two more stories in this series. On 12 October he quoted Killen saying, ‘It is characteristic of a certain kind of so-called journalism in this country that certain sections of my Cabinet submission were reported accurately, while other parts were selected for distortion to contrive a mixture that would create a sensational impact and alarm the public’. The next day Toohey questioned whether the size and unwieldiness of the Defence Department bureaucracy had contributed to the Maralinga plutonium controversy: ‘In the Maralinga case… there have been accusations within the department that relevant information about the plutonium buried at the South Australian site of the British nuclear tests has not flowed to all levels of the department that needed to know’.
By 13 October 1978, both government and Opposition politicians were claiming that they were ignorant of what was at Maralinga, that others had misled them, or that someone from the other side had misled parliament. Hayden said Garland had misled parliament in 1972, while former Labor Defence minister Lance Barnard said his own department had misled him about Maralinga in 1973. The former Labor minister for Environment and Conservation Moss Cass said that he could not remember being told about plutonium buried at Maralinga, a claim undermined by a letter he wrote dated 3 December 1974 in which he referred to ‘long lived and highly radioactive wastes contained in the Airfield Cemetery’, seemingly a reference to the ‘discrete mass’ later removed by the British. The letter did not specifically mention plutonium but did mention contamination both at the airfield and at Taranaki and called for a survey to better understand how radioactive wastes had been stored, dispersed and taken up by the ‘biosystem’. Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser countered by saying that the previous government had had as much information available as the current one. While this claim was true, it did not reflect much credit on the efforts of his own ministers.
Reacting to media reports about Maralinga and concerns from his state constituency, the premier of South Australia Don Dunstan wrote to Fraser asking for a full inquiry. The letter was tabled in evidence to Senate Estimates on 17 October 1978 and contained the following statement: ‘On a matter of such fundamental significance to public health and safety as the proper disposal of plutonium and other high level radio active wastes, it is essential that the fullest information on security and other precautions be assembled’.
As the story reverberated around Canberra, Fraser asked for briefings. A senior adviser in the Resources Branch, GF Cadogan-Cowper, set out the history of the issue in parliament from 1972 in a briefing note dated 13 October. He noted that the Opposition might focus on Vic Garland’s answer: ‘Should you be questioned on the dumping of wastes it may be necessary to note that the advice Mr Garland received was apparently incomplete’. In questionable advice, given the long half-life of the Maralinga plutonium, he told Fraser, ‘Emphasis could be laid on the short half life of the fission products and that because of their short half life the quantity has decreased rapidly over the 20 years since the tests’.
A few days later in the Herald, Peter Bowers took stock of the frenetic activity since the Toohey story had broken: ‘We have learned more about what is buried at Maralinga in the past week than in the past 20 years. And there is much more yet to be learned about the Maralinga caper’. The era of revelations was now underway. Bowers summed up his view of the events:
The real issue is why the presence of plutonium had been kept so long not only from the Australian people but, apparently, from the Australian Government. The real danger – the ever present danger – is that governments and their bureaucracies are secretive and tell the public only what they think the public should know. The Australian public would still be ignorant of what was buried by the British at Maralinga 20 years ago [were] it not for the fact that a Cabinet document was leaked to a reporter.