David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate—

(a) affirms that it is essential to protect whistleblowers, to expand their protections and to include a clear public interest test;

(b) commits to urgently reforming whistleblower laws and creating a Whistleblower Protection Authority;

(c) celebrates the return to Australia of journalist and whistleblower Julian Assange;

(d) notes with concern that Afghanistan war crimes whistleblower David McBride is in prison right now because broken whistleblower laws failed him; and

(e) recognises that Australian Taxation Office whistleblower Richard Boyle faces a potential prison sentence after broken laws were found to not protect his actions.

As millions of Australians and millions of people around the world have welcomed the freedom of Julian Assange, we need to take stock and remember those journalists and those other whistleblowers who are still paying the price for speaking the truth. Without whistleblowers, we wouldn't know about schemes such as robodebt or the abuse inside the Ashley children's prison in Tasmania. We wouldn't have seen the horrors of the 'Collateral murder' video of Iraqi civilians and journalists being murdered in cold blood by the United States military. We wouldn't know about how the New South Wales police colluded with the Hunter Catholic diocese to cover up sexual abuse by priests and avoid criminal prosecutions of priests.

Whether whistleblowers are telling the truth about US imperialism, the United States war machine and the complicity of Australia in those wars, talking about government misconduct, talking about the war crimes of Australian Defence Force personnel in Afghanistan or blowing the whistle on corporate misbehaviour—appalling overcharging by corporations of the public—we must stand with them. We must ensure that the legal structures we put in place are there to protect them, tell truth to power and, once they've told truth to power, not go to jail for the privilege. The fact is: Australia's whistleblowing laws are fundamentally broken. In some countries, if you blow the whistle and identify government money being misspent—often in the millions—there are laws in place that don't just protect the person who bravely blows the whistle but, in some cases, can actually reward people for doing the right thing in protecting the public interest.

In the United States, if you blow the whistle on state or federal fraud, there are laws in place that show that, if money's recovered, the whistleblower doesn't go to jail for disclosing the fraud; the whistleblower gets a modest but fair share of the money that's recovered by the public. Imagine Australia having laws that, instead of jailing whistleblowers, gives them a modest but fair share of the money that's recovered. That's not been on the agenda of the Labor government, and it was not on the agenda of the coalition government, but these are laws that have been in place for decades and decades in the United States.

In Australia, the more likely scenario is that, if you blow the whistle, you lose your job. Often you lose your home. You get dragged into the criminal justice system by the government with few, if any, protections. Secret evidence is led against you in court, and your own evidence is excluded by certificates filed by the Attorney-General, alleging national security, so that even the judge can't see your defence. And, as we've seen time and time again, you can face jail. Just occasionally, perhaps because a government in our region might intervene, like the government of Timor-Leste, you might be saved at the last minute from going to jail. But, of course, we know that this government is quite comfortable with jailing whistleblowers because they've done it very, very recently.

That might sound like hyperbole, but, in fact, you can prove it. The Human Rights Law Centre has undertaken a comprehensive review of Australia's whistleblowing laws and found that there had not been a single successful case brought by a whistleblower under federal laws designed to protect the public or private sector employees who speak out about wrongdoing.

You would think that a government that came in promising transparency and whistleblower protections would be urgently trying to fill the gaps, put in place a whistleblower's commission and protect people who speak the truth, but, instead, we've got a government that is scrubbing the speeches given by Prime Minister Albanese from his website if they've made any mention of transparency.

Before Prime Minister Albanese became Prime Minister, he spoke about some of this stuff as though it mattered to him. He made a speech about the core pillars of democracy. The Prime Minister, then the opposition leader, said one of the core pillars of democracy was transparency: FOI laws that work and whistleblower protections that work. He talked the big talk in opposition and then mysteriously, sometime, about March of this year, the speech that had been on his website for years was scrubbed—just rubbed off his website. And, within a matter of months, his government put David McBride in jail for blowing the whistle. Join the dots.

This is a government that talked the talk of transparency in opposition, but they've come in and, in some ways, been even worse than the coalition on this stuff. They are deeply, catastrophically underfunding the FOI system so that the delays in FOI are longer now than they were under the worst days of the Morrison government. This is a government where the current Attorney-General, when he was in opposition, even put an affidavit on in support of former senator Rex Patrick's case to try and get some transparency and accountability in the FOI system. He came into office as the Attorney-General and backed in the case to kill off Rex Patrick's case. He backed in the Morrison government's defence of their appalling FOI system.

Let's just talk about a couple of brave people, a couple of brave whistleblowers. Prime Minister Albanese stood near Canberra Airport and welcomed back Julian Assange, a brave whistleblower—and credit to the Albanese government for changing the tone and doing the work they did to get Julian Assange home. But it's pretty hard to take a Prime Minister basking in the glow of getting one whistleblower released after he had to plead guilty to a crime under a law that should never have applied to him, a law that the Prime Minister has never challenged, a law that the foreign minister has never challenged. It's pretty hard to take the Prime Minister basking in that, barely five kilometres away from David McBride, whom he put in jail for more than 5½ years for blowing the whistle on war crimes in Afghanistan. It's pretty hard to take that. I can imagine it's pretty hard for David McBride and his family to take that as well. It's pretty hard to take, because David McBride, just like Julian Assange, blew the whistle on war crimes, and our laws failed David. They failed him so comprehensively that he couldn't even present his defence in court, because of a certificate issued by the Attorney-General to squash the evidence. David is serving a 5½-year jail term for telling us the truth about war crimes in Afghanistan—what a comprehensive fail.

It is not only David McBride but also Richard Boyle. Richard Boyle blew the whistle on some of the most unethical practices in the Australian tax office. He blew the whistle because no-one would listen to him inside the ATO. He raised it time and time again, and no-one was going to stop the unethical practices—breaking small businesses, breaking small taxpayers, breaking them financially and sometimes emotionally. He blew the whistle because nothing else was changing it. He was backed in by a majority report from the Senate that said he was right in what he did. He was backed in by an internal review by the ATO. He was right to blow the whistle. And do you know what happened? The former government started a prosecution against him for telling the truth, and this government is continuing it. When he tried to say, 'I had to gather all this evidence before I could blow the whistle,' what did this government do? This government ran a case that said: 'The whistleblowing laws don't cover you gathering your evidence together. If you broke any secrecy law by pulling your case together before you gave it to a journalist, none of that is covered.' They've left him with no defence at all. Everyone independent who looks at the Boyle case says that it's proof positive that our laws are so fundamentally broken that no whistleblower can use them, and yet Richard Boyle is being ground through the criminal justice system, and he can see the jail in front of him, just like David McBride said.

Why is this happening? It's because the government wants to deter whistleblowers. And the coalition is quite complicit in it. They don't want anyone to blow the whistle. In fact, if you read the sentencing judgement that David McBride got—and they were remarks put in by the judge at the urging of the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions—it keeps talking about deterrence. Why did David McBride get such a long jail sentence? It's because of deterrence. What does that mean? It means the court, on application by the government, on the urging of the office of the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions, with evidence and money paid for by the Attorney-General and by the Albanese government, wanted to tell other whistleblowers, 'Don't you dare.'

We need a whistleblower commission. We need world-class whistleblower laws. We need to be protecting and rewarding whistleblowers, not putting them in jail. That's the urgent task that this parliament needs to adopt. So we say this, with millions of Australians behind us: thank God Julian Assange is back and can spend time with his family and his kids, and we thank him for blowing the whistle on war crimes, but let's not stop with freeing Julian Assange. Let's free David McBride, let's end the prosecution of Richard Boyle and let's change the laws so that whistleblowers become heroes and are rewarded for their public service, not put in jail by a rotten government that wants to hide the truth.