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

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. The importance of freedom of information is that, without it and without documents being made public, we end up in a situation where people do blow the whistle because they think the public is entitled to be aware of what is actually happening. If you do not have an adequate freedom of information regime, you get the issue of public interest disclosures.

I believe that the media is an important check and balance to the misuse of power. I believe that information plays an essential role in ensuring that we produce good public policy. Rather like the scientific community, which engages in peer review as its modus operandi, the media has a vital role in covering public policy issues adequately so that policies are exposed to scrutiny. Through this kind of process, better policies ultimately win out.

While the bill should be supported, it represents an inadequate first step. If we look at what is ignored, there is no commitment to protecting what are referred to as whistleblowers, so in any case where someone may have revealed confidential information they can be prosecuted and that may still well include any journalists who report the story.

There is indeed a contrast here between the case of Michael Harvey and Gerard McManus on the one hand and Mr Allan Kessing on the other: the whistleblower gets no protection under Commonwealth law even with this change, whereas under New South Wales law there is a ‘stepped disclosure’ regime where legal protection is extended to disclosures by public servants, provided they meet certain conditions. Nor do we have a commitment to genuine freedom of information.

Our democracy will ultimately require major reforms in this arena, not merely for the sake of protecting journalists or, indeed, whistleblowers, for that matter; rather, it is a major task to build public confidence in our public and civic institutions. Critical in this rebuilding of trust will be creating a culture of accountability which, in turn, rests on creating a culture that is pro disclosure and the opening up of information sources.

This legislation has been the subject of considerable public criticism on the basis that it is inadequate. For example, Fairfax Media spokesman Bruce Wolpe said that, unless the federal shield law was accompanied by whistleblower protection and state shield laws, the new scheme would be missing ‘an essential part of the package’. The New South Wales Attorney-General, John Hatzistergos, has noted that federal shield law would be ‘inadequate and half-baked’ unless it was accompanied by protection for whistleblowers along the lines of the protected disclosure laws in New South Wales. We have also heard Alexander Brown, head of a national project to reform whistleblower laws at Griffith University, stating that journalists would still be dragged into prosecutions unless the government introduced whistleblower protection laws.

As I have mentioned, the New South Wales system establishes a ‘stepped disclosure’ regime in which legal protection is extended to disclosures by public servants if they meet certain conditions. This is in stark contrast to the threat facing federal public servants such as Mr Kessing if they make unauthorised disclosures, even if those disclosures are in the public interest. In the case of Allan Kessing, there were disclosures that came from the area of Customs about airport security, and it was reported in the Age that, a week after these disclosures became public, the federal government appointed the British aviation security expert Sir John Wheeler to examine Australia’s airport security.

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