Page 3443 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 17 August 2011
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Secrecy laws and open government in Australia, comprehensively considers all these issues.
The next point raised in the motion is public interest disclosure. I would like to start with a quote from the book Whistleblowing in the Australian Public Sector, edited by AJ Brown. The first line of the introduction says: “Of the many challenges in modern public sector management, few are as complex as the encouragement and management of whistleblowing.”
This morning we considered some elements of this issue and my motion seeks to more comprehensively cover the range of reforms that are necessary for the Public Interest Disclosure Act. In that debate we considered the issue of compensation extensively and briefly touched on the need for improvements in the broader public disclosure of maladministration or other wrongdoing. The fact that the act prevents the minister from being told about the problems and therefore involved in formulating a specific response does not make sense and certainly is one issue that should be looked at to see if we can find a more effective mechanism to ensure that disclosures are comprehensively responded to.
The scope of broader disclosure has been addressed by the whistling while they work project and I draw members’ attention particularly to the 2009 report into reforms of the public interest disclosure legislation in Queensland. They found that reform was imperative for disclosures outside the agency and this was a key test for this type of legislation. Subsequent to the report, the Queensland parliament passed a new Public Interest Disclosure Act that responded to these concerns and addressed things such as disclosure to journalists.
There are a range of other issues set out in the whistling while they work project reports and issue papers and I particularly draw members’ attention to the tables set out on page 2 of the issues paper I have referred to in the motion. That table ranks all jurisdictions’ laws on 10 broad categories with a range of subcategories within them. These include who should be eligible for protection, what types of disclosures should be covered, how do we deal with anonymous disclosures, how do we guard against misuse, what legal protection should be provided and how are other integrity agencies involved in the disclosure process. The ACT act does very poorly in this analysis. Unfortunately, we are often the lowest ranked jurisdiction. In fact, the author of that paper has since observed that the ACT has perhaps the worst disclosure law in the country.
One point that I touched on earlier and I would like to add to is the need for service-wide education. One study—again from the book Whistleblowing in the Australian Public Sector—found that 54 per cent of public servants were not sure about the nature of any protections provided by disclosure acts applicable to them. The study also found that agencies that had a higher awareness of public interest disclosure laws also had staff who believed that management’s response to whistleblowing would be positive. This highlights the importance of education in ensuring the probity of agency activity as, of course, those who feel the system will protect them are more likely to report problems.
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