Kelvin Thomson (Wills, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am generally supportive of the Evidence Amendment (Journalists’ Privilege) Bill 2007, which provides a measure of professional privilege to journalists who refuse to name their sources. The bill is modelled on similar provisions in the New South Wales Evidence Act 1995. The key difference is that the New South Wales legislation offers a general protection, whereas the current bill offers protection only to journalists. The structure of the protection allows a judge discretion to refuse to adduce evidence if they believe that the harm the evidence would cause to the source outweighs a range of other considerations, such as the probative value of the evidence. In effect, it would offer the court a discretion as to whether to exclude the evidence and would also allow the court to make a range of ancillary orders to protect the identity of the person. In my view, this appears on the face of it to be a sensible test. It weighs the competing interests of the court to hear evidence from all relevant parties against the right of journalists to keep the confidence of informers. This on its own does not go far enough.

Indeed, Labor has proposed a series of reforms in this area. At its recent national conference, Labor’s national platform was amended to include the following: (1) we would legislate for proper freedom of information laws that enable Australians to access appropriate information about government activities; (2) we would move to implement the Australian Law Reform Commission recommendations on sedition laws; (3) we would provide shield laws for protecting confidential sources and whistleblowers; and (4) we would review those laws that criminalise reporting of matters of public interest. Without such a full range of reforms, it is clear that the Howard government is not committed to bringing about an open or transparent government. This is a government which is secretive and which has taken every opportunity to shield itself from public scrutiny. We need a fuller set of reforms to ensure open government. In many ways, this bill encapsulates the things that are wrong with this government and how flawed it is. It is essentially too little, too late.

If you look at the nature of the proposed legislation, you will see it is very restricted in its scope in that it relates only to journalists. There is no protection for whistleblowers or what are now known as public interest disclosures. The government has been dragged kicking and screaming to do something, despite the fact that there have, in effect, been similar and indeed better laws for many years in other jurisdictions. The legislation has only appeared after enormous media pressure stemming from a particular case, and the government seeks to solve a particularly embarrassing problem rather than operating from first principles.

While I am happy to support this bill, it introduces the minimum reform which the government could possibly introduce and still call it reform. In a nutshell, that encapsulates the nature and character of this administration. In areas where the government is not sincere or fair dinkum, such as global warming, the government’s modus operandi is: do as little as is absolutely necessary, do it at the last minute, only act under extreme duress or pressure or where there is a problem in the polls. Time and again we see this approach from a government which has run out of puff, run out of thinking, run out of genuine concern about the future and run out of the ability to engage in substantive, quality policy reform. If you look at the record of recent months, we saw last-minute water reform, the Murray-Darling $10 billion scheme—

See this speech in context