Mark Dreyfus (Isaacs, Australian Labor Party, Cabinet Secretary) Share this | Hansard source

I do thank the member for Mackellar for her question. I can assure the member for Mackellar that integrity is very important to every member of our government, and I would hope that integrity is important to every member of the Australian community. Our government is committed to delivering strong, effective and accessible protections for whistleblowers.

Just to remind the House of where we've got to in this, in June last year, the parliament passed priority amendments to the Public Interest Disclosure Act which ensured there were immediate improvements to the public sector whistleblower scheme in place in time for the commencement of the National Anti-Corruption Commission. That set of reforms implemented 21 of the 33 recommendations of the review of the Public Interest Disclosure Act 2013 that was conducted by Mr Philip Moss, an eminent former Australian public servant, in 2016. To give some context to that, these were the first significant public-sector whistleblower reforms since the Public Interest Disclosure Act was first enacted by the Gillard government, a Labor government, in 2013. When we enacted the Public Interest Disclosure Act in 2013, we took the precaution of writing into that act a statutory review. That statutory review took place because the former government didn't have a choice, and the statutory review was carried out by Mr Moss. Regrettably, the former government didn't see fit to implement a single one of those recommendations; we have implemented 21 of the recommendations.

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