Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I move amendment (1) on sheet 2, as circulated in my name:

(1) Clause 26, page 23 (table item 3), after "persons", insert "or to the environment".

Currently under the bill, only significant and imminent acts that are likely to affect the health and safety of one or more persons can be disclosed to a third party—a journalist or a member of parliament, for example—immediately, without going through internal procedures first. Our amendment will allow an external disclosure to occur immediately where there is a substantial threat to the environment. For instance, under the current wording an oil rig that is likely to pollute an entire marine environment could not be publicly revealed unless it affected the health of the workers, too. This amendment will include the environment as an emergency disclosure and will also restrict disclosures on serious matters that have either already happened or where a time frame is not known to the discloser.

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