Human Rights Law Centre urges overhaul of whistleblower protections as federal corruption commission ramps up

The government is seeking - ahead of the establishment of the new National Anti-Corruption Commission - to legislate stronger whistleblower protections, particularly for federal public servant whistleblowers, in its Public Interest Disclosure Amendment (Review) Bill.

In a joint submission to a Senate inquiry into the proposed amendment, the Human Rights Law Centre, Griffith University's Centre for Governance and Public Policy and Transparency International Australia have called for Labor to be more ambitious and overhaul whistleblower protections.

Human Rights Law Centre senior lawyer Kieran Pender has told The Canberra Times that incremental change has left a real mess of protections and the government needs to be more ambitious.

"The current proposal for reform is certainly not enough. It's the beginning. It is some minor technical changes to the Public Interest Disclosure Act," he said.

"Whistleblowing laws aren't working. We know that. There's a lot of survey evidence that shows that whistleblowers have unhappy experiences blowing the whistle in the public and private sector. The laws that were supposed to give whistleblowers protections on paper aren't translating in practice.

"There hasn't been a single successful case brought by a whistleblower under the Public Interest Disclosure Act for public servants or Corporations Act for private sector employees."

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The amendment bill seeks to implement "priority" recommendations of the 2016 Moss Review of whistleblower protections. A second stage of reforms is expected to start later in the year.

Mr Pender said a substantive response to the Moss Review is well overdue, but now time is pressing with the NACC due to start in the middle of the year.

"The government has moved forward with a transformative integrity reform with the establishment of the National Anti-Corruption Commission, but whistleblower protections must sit alongside that," he said.

"If we don't have people empowered and protected to speak up, the institutional reform that we are currently seeing won't deliver the results intended.

"Unfortunately, the Labor bill doesn't establish a whistleblower protection commissioner. The government is committed to a discussion paper on that this year. But that's another key part of our submission, we need whistleblower protection authority. So whistleblowers are protected not only in theory, but also in practice."

Mr Pender said the Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus has been a champion for whistleblowers, but Mr Pender said whistleblowers deserve wholesale protection.

"What we need now is to convert those words into action, for the government to be bold, to be ambitious on whistleblower protections," he said.

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