The latest bizarre twist in this dedication to concealment means that it can be argued that Australia has committed a form of human rights abuse, which means that we now need to be careful about publicly protesting about alleged human rights abuses in other countries. We are no longer innocent of such abuses.
The ALP government preaches transparency while taking extraordinary steps to jail a person for telling the truth (a “truth” verified by independent inquiry) about what was really happening in the public service around 2018 and the harm being inflicted on communities.
The Coalition and ALP attorneys general could have at all times stopped the community damaging prosecutions. Instead, attorneys generals Christian Porter, Michaelia Cash, and Mark Dreyfus all turned the role of attorney general into a position that might be better described as “The Commissioner for Concealing the Truth”.
The Coalition wanted the truth teller to be jailed for the term of his natural life.
The ALP’s “Commissioner for Concealing the Truth” reduced the charges so that the penalty could be 20 or 30 years jail, perhaps reasoning that such a sentence would be sufficient to stop public servants from telling the truth.
Last week, the “Commissioner for Concealing the Truth” had a huge win in the South Australian Supreme Court, making it easy to prosecute and jail the truth telling public servant for the longest possible period.
The victim of Australian government abuse will be given a form of legal aid, but as we saw in the South Australian case, his legal representation had little chance against the might of the best legal brains in the country. Now that top government legal team can advocate making the jail sentence for telling the truth as long as possible to make sure no public servant is ever again is tempted to benefit the community by telling the truth.
Regular readers will know the early part of the story. Five years ago Richard Boyle, the whistleblower, revealed for all to see the Australian Taxation Office’s then ruthless abuse of small enterprises. It had become akin to a sport for ATO officials. Boyle had worked for the tax office for around 13 years, specialising in debt collection, where the ATO has been given incredible powers. Boyle saw the ATO abusing those powers. He tried to alert ATO executives but was ignored, so he decided to be a whistleblower in the national interest.
He provided key evidence in the ABC Four Corners’ ATO revelations in 2018.
Boyle’s evidence was later supported by the Inspector-General of Taxation and Small Business Ombudsman Kate Carnell. The combination of the evidence of Boyle and Carnell triggered considerable improvement in the tax collection methods applied by the ATO to the benefit of the community and, I would argue, the ATO itself.
The nation has been the great beneficiary of Boyle telling the truth.
The Coalition government charged Boyle with 66 offences, carrying a maximum sentence of 161 years in prison. The alleged offences covered both the act of actually telling the truth to the community and the assembling of material necessary to tell that truth to the community.
The current attorney general Mark Dreyfus introduced whistleblower protection legislation, claiming that Australian government would be more transparent. But the whistleblower protection act was carefully structured to differentiate between the act of whistleblowing and the collection of essential information to conduct that act.
The attorney general allowed the prosecution of Boyle to continue using those alleged offences that were related to the collection of information.
Legal aid enabled Boyle to contest before the South Australian Supreme Court that collecting the information could not be separated from the actual dissemination. Dreyfus allowed the Commonwealth prosecutor to spend huge sums to assemble a formidable legal team against Boyle’s legal aid. The South Australian Supreme Court spent 10 months deliberating on whether the Dreyfus backed legal argument was correct.
The attorney general won the case that collecting information was different from disseminating it, and so now he can authorise a prosecution against Boyle for assembling the vital community benefiting information.
It is possible Boyle could use legal aid to appeal to the High Court, which in the past has shown a commendable willingness to base judgments on the real facts in ATO abuse cases.
In the five years that have passed, Boyle’s wife’s publicly revealed that while her husband has not been jailed, he found it very difficult to gain employment and suffered periods of understandable depression. It’s an Australian government punishment akin to some of the nonviolent abuse cases that Australia complains about in world forums.
The attorney general should start the process of ending such abuses by abandoning the charges against Boyle and amending the whistleblower protection legislation which, by funding the South Australian case, Dreyfus has compromised.
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The dedication of both our major political parties, when in government, to punish whistleblowers who release national information that benefits the community and the public service has been intensified.