The attorney-general says whistleblower and integrity reforms will help boost trust in government. 

Federal Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus says whistleblowing is a necessary part of maintaining integrity in public and private organisations, and those that seek to leak inside information for the public good must be protected. 

“I’ve got a long-standing commitment to the protection of genuine whistleblowers,” Mr Dreyfus said in an address to the Australian Public Sector Anti-Corruption Conference in Sydney this week.

“It’s about the reporting of maladministration, the reporting of any breaches of codes of conduct of any bad government, all of those things are the subject of whistleblower protection.”

He announced that all commonwealth entities will be subject to the Public Governance, Performance and Accountability Act 2013 as part of reforms to complement the new National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC).

“We already have this requirement in relation to fraud under the Public Governance, Performance and Accountability Rule 2014 — this rule will be amended to extend that requirement to corruption,” the Attorney-General said.

“The commission will also engage in broader public education about its role, corruption risks, and avenues to report corrupt conduct.”

He described the creation of the NACC as “the single biggest reform to the commonwealth integrity framework in decades”. 

“The silver lining in the commonwealth being the last Australian jurisdiction to act is that it has allowed us to look at the last 30 years of these anti-corruption commissions at the state and territory level and ensure we take the best features of all of them, and get the balance right.

“Whether it is our schools, hospitals and healthcare system, courts or welfare system — public trust in these institutions is critical to their ability to successfully deliver these vital services,” he said.

Mr Dreyfus has been working on whistleblower protections since Labor was voted into office earlier this year, including setting up a taskforce within the A-G’s department to work on ways to protect whistleblowers in the new integrity commission.

In 2016, a statutory review of the Public Interest Disclosure Act, led by public servant Philip Moss, proposed several “substantial changes”, which Mr Dreyfus notes the Coalition government failed to implement. He says the new government is committed to bolstering the scheme overall.

He also said public servants should blow the whistle on any type of maladministration by a commonwealth official if nothing has come of their complaint to a superior.

“One of the important lessons we have learned from the state and territory anti-corruption commissions is the value of prevention and education,” Mr Dreyfus said.

“The commission will provide guidance and information to support the public sector to understand the concept of corrupt conduct, and to identify and address vulnerabilities to corruption.

“This work will harden the Commonwealth public sector against corruption, and will be informed by insights the Commission draws from its investigations and the intelligence it collects about corruption.”

Mr Dreyfus suggested he will pursue separate whistleblower protection reforms and public interest disclosure amendments before the end of the year.

“The second stage of reforms will commence next year following passage of the priority amendments. This will involve redrafting the Public Interest Disclosure Act to address the underlying complexity of the scheme and provide effective and accessible protections to public sector whistleblowers,” the Attorney-General said.

One of Australia’s most prominent failures to protect a whistleblower can be seen in the case of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. 

Mr Assange is fighting a US attempt to extradite him from the UK to face charges in connection with the publication of hundreds of thousands of leaked documents about the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, as well as diplomatic cables.

Press freedom advocates and human rights groups say the prosecution of Mr Assange under the US Espionage Act sets a dangerous precedent.

Asked about the matter in October this year, Mr Dreyfus said; “Mr Assange’s case has gone on long enough”. 

He alluded to private talks with the Biden administration in the US about the issue.

“The prime minister has said this. The foreign minister has said this. I’ve said this. I will say it again: it has gone on long enough but we’re not going to conduct our representations to the government of the United States in public. I’ll say no more about that.”

It is a significantly different view from that of the previous federal government, whose Prime Minister Scott Morrison was accused of having “trivialised and laughed about the suffering of an Australian and his family” by making “smutty” and “lewd” remarks in response to calls for Mr Assange’s protection. 

The previous Coalition government also oversaw raids on journalists and the prosecutions of ATO whistleblower Richard Boyle and Bernard Collaery.