Australia

A fair point, I should have specified former member of organised crime. Especially since they still seem to care about their standing with current organised criminals.

Your second sentence is what's important. It doesn't matter whether he was previously a member of an organised crime gang and if you've seen his reporting you'll know his stories are very unique within Australian journalism because he has so many contacts and so much trust. The ABC was right when it said, "Mahmood Fazal does extremely challenging, impactful and important public-interest journalism for the ABC...". He's not a reporter than can just be 1:1 replaced by some generic journalism degree graduate.

The real problem is that it seems like he still has more than just connections to that world, which is putting himself and others at risk and compromising his professional integrity as a journalist. You definitely can't have an active participant in the crime world working at the national broadcaster. However, it's important to remember the guy making all the accusations is untrustworthy so we will need to wait to see how much is true.

Man foi is continually being rolled back. Ots the kind of thing that i'm not sure politicians should have control over. A bit like elections, or monetary policy.

I suppose one difference is that its sonewhat self policing, no Party should want to get rid of it completely, because they rely on that mechanism to attack the Party in power. But wheres the line on that, and if overwhelming majoritys/senators are convinced to make a reduction in access its almost impossible to see it rolled back.