Milton Dick (Oxley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to enter the debate to speak on the Treasury Laws Amendment (Enhancing Whistleblower Protections) Bill 2018. I follow on from the member for Parramatta, who has had a long interest in small business matters and particularly in the areas of consumer and regulatory protections. I want to continue on a couple of points that she made. One of the horror stories that we've heard as a result of the banking royal commission has been the fact that whistleblowers in in country haven't been empowered—or haven't felt the ability—to know where to go for information. As we've heard from the shadow minister, we will be supporting this bill tonight. But I do want to enter the debate and also reflect on this side of the chamber and how we would offer greater protections. Whilst we have heard that this is a step in the right direction, the Labor opposition believe there is much, much more we can do in this space.

The bill, as we know, implements to some degree some of the recommendations of the September 2017 report of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Corporations and Financial Services into whistleblower protections in the corporate, public and not-for-profit sectors. As we know, the establishment of this inquiry and this bill was part of a deal done between the government and then Senator Nick Xenophon and Senator Hinch to pass the Fair Work (Registered Organisations) Amendment Act 2016. The difficulty we have with this is that, in some sense, this wasn't the pure intention of what the government was doing. It was a hybrid in terms of how it ended up in this space.

I will go through the improvements, as we see then, before I offer some constructive advice to the government. The key improvements are that the new regime significantly broadens the conduct about which disclosures can be made; the new regime covers misconduct, an improper state of affairs or circumstances in relation to the entity or related body corporate; and disclosable conduct is also specified to include conduct that represents a danger to the public or financial system, disclosures about a breach of any Commonwealth law subject to a term of imprisonment of over one year and breaches of other specified acts.

By contrast, the current protections in the Corporations Act only cover disclosures about breaches of the corporations legislation. It allows for anonymous disclosures, and I guess one of the difficulties that we've seen that the existing regime requires that a whistleblower provides their name when making a disclosure in order to qualify for protection, which is contrary of the issue of being a whistleblower in the first place.

This removes the requirement that a whistleblower makes a disclosure in good faith. This requirement has been found to create un certainty and, more importantly, a risk for whistleblowers. This change means that protections and remedies are based on the objective reasonableness of the whistleblower's grounds to suspect that information disclosed indicates misconduct or other disclosable matters. It expressly allows for disclosures to lawyers for the purposes of obtaining legal advice and strengthens restrictions of the revealing of a whistleblower's identity.

One of the things I have seen as a member of parliament is the horrific stories in my own community of those people who have been ripped off and taken advantage of by the banking sector system in Australia. Late last year I was privileged to sit with a number of victims of banks in Australia in my own electorate and held my own roundtable of victims. I'll be honest: I wasn't quite sure what was going to come out of that roundtable. I knew there had been problems in the industry. I'd heard from people at mobile offices and street corner meetings about their experiences, but opening up to the ability to listen to people firsthand was a difficult experience but a very worthwhile experience for me as a member of parliament.

We know that the Morrison government fought against a banking royal commission every step of the way and that they agreed reluctantly not because the government thought it was the right policy decision; they believed they were going to lose a vote on the floor of parliament with the member for Dawson wishing to cross the floor, and there was the subsequent announcement of the royal commission.

Many members of parliament on this side held similar roundtables, so I'm not on my own there. One of the consistent themes and disclosures that occurred at those—and I know the member for Paterson and the member for Newcastle held similar roundtables to hear firsthand. One of the tragedies I heard from a number of people was that they felt they had nowhere to go to tell their story. In fact, they felt no-one would believe them. They felt that the power imbalance was so great that there was no point in telling their story. They thought, 'Well, that's just the system that we have. That broke my heart, but I resolved from listening to those stories that we needed a greater mechanism and, clearly, a greater pathway for people to be able to tell their story but also to bell the cat when it comes to improper practices, when people felt the deck was stacked against them.

I guess tonight in this parliament we're dealing with only a very small facet of that. As I said, the Labor Party will be supporting this bill tonight, but we fundamentally believe there are greater protections that should be in place and a greater, more open procedure when it comes to these issues. That's why I was delighted that the Leader of the Opposition and the shadow minister for financial services and the shadow minister for justice, Clare O'Neil, have put forward a bold proposal of positive ideas to deal with the issue of banking whistleblowers.

In the time remaining, I will highlight a couple of those issues because I do want to associate myself with this policy. After meeting with victims, after listening to their stories, there is nothing more important that I think this term of parliament can deal with than ensuring that those people—and in many cases we know, not just in my community but right across Australia, people put themselves on the line at great personal cost to their own careers, to their family circumstances and, in some cases, their own financial circumstances. So I am pleased that, if privileged to be elected, a future Shorten Labor government will establish: an Australian whistleblower act to strengthen, expand and, for the first time, consolidate the public and private sector whistleblower regimes under a single set of laws overseen by a new and independent whistleblower protection authority; a whistleblower reward scheme, which has had some debate, but is something that I strongly support to enable whistleblowers to receive a percentage of a penalty awarded by a court arising out of conduct that they blew the whistle on; and a whistleblower protection authority to help whistleblowers understand their rights and disclosure processes. The other thing I heard very clearly from people was that people didn't understand how they could access the current regime. I think that those three highlights of our whistleblower policy in particular will give that certainty that many, many people are demanding. I will spend a couple of minutes in my time remaining tonight to highlight the fact that Labor will provide $3.2 million over the forward estimates to immediately set up the whistleblower protection authority within the Office of the Commonwealth Ombudsman and it would house five full-time positions dedicated to assisting whistleblowers through the disclosure process.

There's been some commentary surrounding the Treasury Laws Amendment (Enhancing Whistleblower Protections) Bill 2018 tonight. We heard from the member for Parramatta regarding the comments of Professor AJ Brown, a leading expert in Australia on whistleblower protections and a member of the government's own expert panel. He's called this bill a 'limited step' and, as we heard, more of a sideways than forward step on key issues. So in my books, it makes it difficult when we're trying to create a path way forward that we're skirting around those issues. As we said before, this is a step in the right direction but we really believe that there is more to be done.

Professor Brown, as we know, is a powerful voice on the government's own expert panel. He's a leading authority on whistleblower laws and he spearheaded a landmark research project on whistleblowing entitled: Whistling While They Work 2. The project surveyed of 702 organisations and its preliminary research found almost one in four organisations had no particular system for recording and tracking wrongdoing concerns and 'did not currently have any strategy, program or process for supporting and protecting staff who raise concerns'. The survey also found that only 40 per cent of organisations provided potential whistleblowers with access to a management-designated support person inside the organisation to ensure the people who needed to disclose information had a pathway to do that. So in my opinion, this spells out clearly that Australia needs to get on and create a holistic approach to dealing with whistleblowers. One of the issues we've got this with this legislation tonight is that it is a patchwork approach to dealing with this issue rather than a holistic approach.

I wanted to speak on this bill tonight because of the people that I have met and the stories that I have heard. I know the heartache that they have endured. I know the difficulties that they have expressed to me as their representative about having to provide the information, not in an open and transparent way, but in a very difficult or somewhat clunky way. I will never forget their stories. I certainly hope that tonight's bill that we're debating, if it is passed as law, will begin some ways to providing that initial pathway, providing some improvements to those people who deserve an open and transparent process to ensure that the misconduct of the past, the horrific circumstances that we've seen in the banking and financial industry in Australia will never, ever happen again.

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