'Afghan Files' Whistleblower David William McBride (Image: AAP/Lukas Coch) 'Afghan Files' Whistleblower David William McBride (Image: AAP/Lukas Coch)

What hope for whistleblowers in the government's war on scrutiny?

If you work in the Commonwealth Public Service and you observe criminality, misconduct or behaviour damaging to the public interest, your options for bringing it to light are limited. And if you work in an intelligence or security agency, you have none at all, and face extraordinary punishment if you try to do so.

For regular public servants, there’s an act called the Public Interest Disclosure Act 2013 (PIDA). That was the work of Mark Dreyfus, Labor’s last attorney-general. It was a good start for protection for both internal whistleblowing (inside an agency or to an ombudsman) and “external whistleblowing” — the kind that most of us are familiar with.

While the “disclosable conduct” is broadly defined (and the whistleblower must only have a reasonable belief that it meets the threshold for disclosure), they must have already made an internal disclosure of the conduct and the whistleblower must have reasonable grounds to think the response of the agency was inadequate (though a Department of Parliamentary Services whistleblower who carefully followed the legislative requirements just lost his Federal Court case because of flaws in the legislation).

But most particularly, the disclosure must be “not, on balance, contrary to the public interest”.

“Public interest” is one of those terms deliberately not defined in law, but the problem is more around the words “on balance”. That allows the public interest benefits of a disclosure to be weighed up against other consequences of the disclosure.

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By Bernard Keane / Crikey politics editor
(Source: crikey.com.au; June 14, 2019; http://tinyurl.com/y69d2245)
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