Luke Gosling (Solomon, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I want to acknowledge all the previous speakers and the member for Clark. Whistleblowers have shown incredible courage and it's right that we put into place legislation that provides effective frameworks to protect them. As others have noted, whistleblowers play an incredibly important role in exposing wrongdoing and in doing so protect the very fabric of our democracy. They protect integrity and the rule of law, which members in this place like to talk about, but without an honest commitment to effective integrity infrastructure in our Commonwealth that rule of law is always under threat.

Australia's public interest disclosure law was introduced when we on this side were last in government in 2015. It was designed to protect whistleblowers against reprisals by senior officials and to promote integrity in the public service. The current Attorney-General was the Attorney-General at that time and introduced it. He was conscious that it was going to need to be looked at in the future to assess whether or not it was working in the national interest, and that's why he a wrote statutory review into act at that time. We recognised that a review was necessary to address some of the complexities of that law. But on us losing government in 2013 a statutory review never took place.

Under the Abbott government the act fell into neglect. Under the Morrison government, the Philip Moss review took place five years later. Protecting whistleblowers wasn't a big priority for those opposite. The coalition did agree in principle to 30 of that review's 33 recommendations, but 'in principle' being the operative words—many would remember that we saw high-profile raids on journalists, other cases of excessive secrecy and secret ministers under the former federal government, under those opposite. 'It was shameful that the government took some four years to respond to Philip Moss's report.' That's what the current Attorney-General, Mark Dreyfus, said before the election, and he announced the following commitment in 2021: 'We intend, in government, to act on Philip Moss's recommendations for necessary improvements to the public interest disclosure scheme.' So fast-forward a year and that is exactly what our government is doing. We are committed to ensuring that Australia has more effective protection for whistleblowers. That's why the Attorney-General announced last week that he would introduce a bill into the parliament before the end of this year—so in this sitting block, however long that may be—which will make priority amendments to the Public Interest Disclosure Act.

This act is an important element of the Commonwealth's integrity and transparency framework. It enables public officials to disclose suspected wrongdoing by another public official or by an Australian government agency. 'Suspected wrongdoing' is defined broadly and includes fraud, serious misconduct and corrupt conduct as well as minor wrongdoing. Public officials who make such disclosures have protections and immunities from liability. Reforms to the PID Act are long overdue, and action is essential to ensure that whistleblowers are supported to come forward with disclosures of public sector wrongdoing and corruption. The government's staged reforms of the PID Act will include the introduction of a bill to parliament before the end of this year, as I just mentioned, and the progression of broader reforms next year to address the underlying complexity of the scheme and to provide effective and accessible protections to public sector whistleblowers.

These amendments deliver on the government's election commitment to implement key recommendations of the 2016 review of the Public Interest Disclosure Act by Philip Moss, and other parliamentary committee reports. Our government has committed to it, and we will get it done.

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