CITATION: Andrew Wilkie MP and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Andrew Wilkie MP and Australian Broadcasting Corporation have received the Whistleblower Supporter of the Year Award for 2019 for the support that has been given jointly to those in Parliament, and in the ABC, who have risen to oppose the weight of secrecy being imposed by the Federal Government upon (a) its own wrongdoing; (b) the wrongdoing of rogue agencies; and (c) the wrongdoing of allies. Mr Andrew Wilkie MP has been chosen to represent his efforts and those of his parliamentary colleagues who went to the media and to the UK. The ABC took the issue before the Federal Court.

The efforts of MPs to protect whistleblowers subjected to secret processes, including secret prison terms, and the resistance shown by ABC to the anti-whistleblower raids on the ABC files, have re-emphasised the indispensable role of whistleblowers in protecting democracy and justice from an autocratic Executive. This reasonable public interest question arises: Did Australian families send sons and daughters to East Timor to assist that country to self-determination, or to trick that country out of its oil revenues? 

Our government has brought unacceptable conduct of cheap trickery to family grief and personal sacrifice. A marketing mentality thinks that the deceptions inherent in a secret process imposed now, may regather to government some respect for its original deceptions against the East Timorese. The Australian Federal Police jointly carries this same shame.

Particular efforts made concerning the treatment of Australian journalist and former Walkley Award winner, Mr Julian Assange, are strongly in the public interest. Just as Australian, David Hicks, was left in Guantanamo Bay to become a political millstone around the neck of a former Prime Minister who abandoned Hicks to his fate, so too will the treatment of Mr Assange by the UK and the USA, wherever these allies detain him, with a hands-off blessings of Australia's Prime Minister and Foreign Affairs Minister. 

Exposing the 5-year investigations by the Inspector General’s Office within Defence into alleged war crimes by Australian Defence Force members, also brings credit to the winners of our Award. The parallels between the imagery disclosed by Mr Assange of US helicopter fire killing civilians in the Middle East, and the ABC’s recent footage of an unarmed person shot by an Australian soldier in Afghanistan, give insight into the use of government secrecy, listening devices, raids, prosecutions, secret imprisonments and never-completed investigations by Australian and US Governments.