Whistleblowers need their own watchdog: Crossbench

Crossbench MPs have stepped up their support for whistleblowers David McBride and Richard Boyle in a bid to persuade Labor to drop court action against the two men for revealing state secrets in the name of the public interest.

The move is a new sign of the demands on Prime Minister Anthony Albanese for stronger laws to protect people who go public about wrongdoing, but the MPs are warning about the “glacial” pace of government action.

David McBride (left), who went to the ABC to expose alleged war crimes in Afghanistan, and Richard Boyle (right) who blew the whistle about wrongdoing at the Tax Office.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen/Joe Armao

Victorian MP Helen Haines joined fellow independents including Andrew Wilkie from Tasmania, Rebekha Sharkie from South Australia and Kate Chaney from Western Australia to call for the prosecutions to be dropped and for the government to move quickly to strengthen the Public Interest Disclosure Act, which sets out the grounds for people to release information without being charged.

McBride, a former military lawyer, is facing trial within weeks over the leak of a cache of documents to the ABC that formed the basis of its “Afghan Files” investigation about potential war crimes.

Boyle went public in 2018 as part of an investigation into the Australian Tax Office by The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and ABC’s Four Corners that revealed heavy-handed debt collection tactics, after his internal complaint was dismissed.

Wilkie said Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus should intervene to drop the prosecutions against the two whistleblowers and the government should do a full rewrite of the disclosure act and set up a “whistleblower authority” to protect the release of information in the public interest.

“Until they do all of those and other things, then the Attorney-General’s claims about the government being good on whistleblower protection are just hollow, it’s as simple as that,” he said.

Independent MPs Dr Helen Haines and Andrew Wilkie are both calling for faster action on protecting whistleblowers.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Haines said the government had promised a new version of the act but was moving at a “glacial” speed by promising a discussion paper before the end of the year.

“A discussion paper by Christmas – that’s not going to help these two individuals. I want action much, much faster than that.”

Chaney said the charges against the two whistleblowers should be dropped. Tasmanian Liberal Bridget Archer also backed the calls, but had to leave the press conference due to parliamentary business.

Journalist and academic Peter Greste, who was jailed in Egypt for more than a year and freed in early 2015, said the prosecutions highlighted the way press freedom was about the “chain of disclosure” and not just the media. Greste is a professor of journalism at Macquarie University.

“We are often asked about how to balance press freedom and national security. I think that implies a false binary – that if you have more of one, by definition you have less of the other,” he said.

“Press freedom and national security are often in tension, but they are not in opposition. If we are going to protect the integrity of our democracy, then, when passing laws in the name of national security, and prosecuting whistleblowers for some inarticulate national security reason, we are also undermining the ability of journalists to do their day jobs, and in the process undermining the very system we are trying to protect.”

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