Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

It is always interesting that when it comes to protecting whistleblowers there are always years and years more consultation that has to happen. Meanwhile, people who have blown the whistle suffer, lose their jobs, lose their promotions and frequently end up being smeared and vilified in the process, and we have years and years more consultation. How many more years do we need before we protect whistleblowers?

I remind the Senate: we have just been going through the Reserve Bank of Australia note bribery scandal. That would not have happened without three very brave whistleblowers who came forward and basically said, 'Enough is enough,' and got that scandal exposed. At the rate the government and the coalition want to move, it would have been, 'No, we have to have many more years of consultation before we work out how we would actually protect those whistleblowers'—not to mention someone like Dave Reid, for example, who came out and made his claim against ANSTO. He was smeared, he suffered character attacks, and of course he was eventually vindicated after he exposed the poor safety controls at the Lucas Heights nuclear reactor. We could go on and name many, many whistleblowers around Australia who have acted in the public interest, who have exposed appalling scandals. The RBA note bribery scandal is a case in point. If we want people to come out and tell the truth, as we had with the Wheat Board, as we have had with the RBA note inquiry and so on, you have to protect them. We have to encourage a culture of people coming forward in the public interest. But all we seem to do is have governments and oppositions, when they change sides, suddenly change perspective on what sort of protections they are prepared to give people who will come forward in the public interest. In the private sector, of course, there is virtually no protection for people at all.

It may interest both the government and the coalition to know that in the United States they have come forward with legislation which actually allows whistleblowers to get some of the benefit if they are saving money, if they are reporting maladministration or fraud. They actually get a percentage of that. That is not something the Greens are proposing, but it is certainly a way for people to have an incentive to watch what corporations and government agencies are doing in terms of reporting when money is being misappropriated, or fraud is occurring or whatever the allegation might be.

I would just stand here and strongly say that you cannot keep putting this off. You cannot keep saying, 'We are going to the election promising all this protection for whistleblowers', and yet the reality is that it is delay, delay, delay, weak action and ultimately we end up with nobody having the courage to come forward. It has been significantly undermined by the move to contracts in the senior echelons of the Public Service. People now are in the position of knowing that their contract may not be renewed.

There are all kinds of problems associated with why we end up not having people coming forward and telling the truth about what is going on in their companies and in the public sector. Senator Collins was talking about an agency. We have talked about having a national integrity commission that would work with the Ombudsman to make sure that when complaints are made if it is maladministration it would go to the Ombudsman and if it is fraud it would go to the Integrity Commission. We have proposed a structure and we have a bill in this parliament to have a national corruption capacity. For the life of me I cannot understand why neither the government nor the coalition is prepared to back a national integrity commission and serious legislation that deals with whistleblowers. I ask them to reconsider and to it least give in-principle support to whistleblowing as a workplace right.