Keeping us honest: protecting whistleblowers

Australia has been fortunate enough to see mostly honest governments. We’ve experienced neither the corruption of 1950s Italy nor the tyranny of 1970s Brazil. We are not, however, without our issues: give a government enough time and it is almost inevitable that corruption or serious wrongdoing will arise.

The institutional corruption of the Bjelke-Petersen government in Queensland showed this. This was followed by the Wood Royal Commission’s revelations of a thoroughly rotten NSW police force.

Currently, the Reserve Bank is embroiled in the nation’s biggest bribery scandal through its subsidiary Securency. The Gillard government’s announcement of a royal commission on child sexual abuse was a response to mounting evidence, including allegations of police collusion. These patterns of wrongdoing repeat.

Whistleblowing provides one system to reveal such serious wrongdoing. Done properly, it creates a method of improving integrity in government. Importantly it also prevents a small problem turning into a full scale catastrophe. As an example, no government can be sure that every person they hire will be honest: whistleblowing provides a fail-safe for this.

Last month, federal attorney-general Mark Dreyfus released proposed legislation designed to protect whistleblowers. However, while a step in the right direction, the bill fails to do so in important situations.

Politicians

The bill won’t protect people from making disclosures about the conduct of ministers (including the prime minister), the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President of the Senate in many circumstances.

Clearly this is an utterly self-interested move by politicians and ought to be changed.

The bill has exclusions for intelligence agencies and the use of intelligence information that result in whistleblowers effectively not being protected in a range of circumstances.

Read the full article, with full links, The Conversation, here

Suelette Dreyfus is Research Fellow, Department of Computing and Information Systems at University of Melbourne