Justice Lucy McCallum rejected the application, finding that a journalist's pledge to keep a source confidential "is not a right or an end in itself" and could be overridden "in the interests of justice". The case was settled out of court and no sources were disclosed. In 2017, the ABC reached a confidential settlement with the Canberra University president of the Chinese Students and Scholars Association after she appeared in a Four Corners program reported by McKenzie about the influence of the Chinese Communist Party in Australian politics and universities. A report by The Australian newspaper about the settlement states that the president "­demanded an apology from the media companies, which was refused. Five months later, [the president's lawyers] filed a defamation action in the Victorian Supreme Court, prompting both media outlets to reach an out-of-court settlement within weeks." Later on, in 2018, Four Corners added an editors note to the program transcript with the rider that: “It was not the intention of the ABC to suggest that [the president]... was a spy or a person who would deliberately cause harm to other students.” McKenzie and veteran reporter Chris Masters have produced several reports detailing allegations that Australia’s special forces committed war crimes in Afghanistan. They have reported that Victoria Cross recipient Ben Roberts-Smith is under investigation by the federal police and the military inspector general. Roberts-Smith has attacked the claims as unfounded and is suing McKenzie and Masters. In 2010, McKenzie and two colleagues, investigative reporters Ben Schneiders and Royce Millar, wrote a story detailing how political parties were storing personal information about voters, raising privacy concerns. A Greens party candidate in the 2010 state election, Fraser Brindley, had supplied the password to a political party database, which he had obtained unlawfully and the journalists including McKenzie subsequently accessed the ALP Eleczilla database. The Victorian Electoral Commissioner referred the journalists to Victoria Police, who charged McKenzie with unauthorised access to a restricted database. McKenzie and his co-accused admitted responsibility for the offence as part of a court diversion program by acknowledging they accessed the database, thereby avoiding a conviction. The trio’s barrister told the magistrate the journalists believed there was a public interest in whether political parties should maintain such data and that investigative journalists provide “genuine service to this community.” The Age also agreed to publish a news article and editorial acknowledging the unlawful conduct. The Age editor-in-chief Andrew Holden defended the paper's decision to publish the database story, stating that investigative journalists needed to pursue stories in the public interest but said the paper was not mindful enough of the legal issues involved.