Jason Falinski (Mackellar, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'd like to thank the member for Fenner, who criticised the member for Hughes for not being able to make it through 15 minutes but managed to fail to do that himself—not that I would encourage him to speak longer for the sake of speaking longer! When we look at this Treasury Laws Amendment (Enhancing Whistleblower Protections) Bill 2018, I think it is important that we start from the first basis. The first basis of whistleblowing legislation is the removal of corruption in a systemic sense from institutions whether they be government, corporate or, indeed, charitable and political institutions. The reason that it is important for this parliament, indeed, for our society, to make sure that corruption does not become a way of life in any of these institutions should be apparent to all of us. But it is the normalisation of abhorrent behaviour which is what we seek to avoid and what every society must seek to avoid. Once it takes hold, like a cancer, it becomes very, very difficult to separate it and to remove it from the corporal body of our society. As such, what we do here in this regard is very important.

I am reminded of John F Kennedy, who was the first modern president to hold televised press conferences. He promised during his election campaign that he would make these press conferences regular, and he held about five a year. It was considered to be something of a remarkable thing that the President of the United States would make himself available five times a year to be questioned by reporters. Of course, in a Westminster system, this is something that would be seen as remarkable if it didn't happen weekly. Nonetheless, he was once asked, 'Would you prefer to live in the Soviet system'—where Nikita Khrushchev was at that point the Supreme Leader of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the Communist Party—'where you have complete and absolute control over what the media says and does?' John F Kennedy was taken aback initially by the question—because obviously, I don't think there is a politician anywhere in the world who wouldn't like to be able to tell the media what they should and shouldn't be allowed to say and, indeed, get them to apologise when they don't say it properly—but he thought carefully about it and realised that, in actual fact, the inherent advantages in a free press, in freedom of speech, and, indeed, in allowing people to call out corruption no matter where it is taking place and no matter what their station in life is, were critical to a free society. He said something that I think was quite remarkable when you think about it from the viewpoint of the 1960s, which was that the advantage of a free system is not its efficiency but is, indeed, its dynamism, its ability to adapt and meet people's needs. Marx, when he was writing Das Kapital said that the benefit of capitalism is its ability to adapt and change—so the problems that I foresee today will not be problems that capitalism has tomorrow—and how true that has proven to be.

In Kennedy's answer is, I think, the key to why whistleblower legislation is so important. It's not that we must have a just and fair society. It is not that we must have a free society that respects order and preserves what is best about our society. We must be seen to have those things as well. For a free society to advance and to thrive every participant in it must believe critically that that society gives them the opportunity that they may not have in any other system to participate in the opportunities and benefits that that society provides and that is capable of being provided by that society. It is not good enough, in other words, for people to believe that the system is rigged against them.

I sometimes think when I stand in this place that it is most unfortunate that we have over and over again the perception of political leaders telling younger Australians that they have no hope and that they have no future because the system is horribly rigged against them. This legislation, more than anything else, will ensure that that perception, that claim, never becomes a reality. Above and beyond all else, it ensures that people who take the critical step of blowing the whistle on what they see as aberrant behaviour are doing something that none of us can ever do from Canberra. They are behaving as individuals in their place and at their time with knowledge that cannot be contained by a single person to point to the aberrant behaviour that otherwise may go unnoticed, unreported and certainly uncorrected. That is why whistleblower legislation is so important.

I note that the minister at the table, Mr Irons, is the former chair of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Corporations and Financial Services, one of the best committees to be a member of in this parliament—and not just because Senator John Williams is a member but also because it does great work.

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