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,isfacing 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 aninvestigation into the Australian Tax Office byThe Age,The Sydney Morning Herald and ABC’sFour Corners that revealed heavy-handed debt collection tactics,after hisinternal 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.