Federal Juristiction

Commonwealth Ombudsman

Alleged practices include:

This Office may have withdrawn from its original role as the independent reviewer of last resort. It moved to a preventative role in competition with the Public Service Commission. It involved itself in assisting agencies, like the Defence Force to new military justice procedures, and boasting to authorities such as the Senate of the Ombudsman’s Office success in this preventative approach.

The flaw in the approach is where agencies do not follow their own procedures or the law, however grand those procedures are, and individual whistleblowers, in good faith, make application to the Ombudsman’s Office for investigation of these breaches of the Ombudsman’s procedures and of the law.

These applications tend to undermine the self-praise by the Ombudsman’s Office, and expose the naivety of that Office. In this situation the Ombudsman’s Office allegedly:

1. May have allegedly informed the applicant that the Office was taking a long term view about the agency under allegation, and would not adversely affect that long term program just for the whistleblower; and
2. Allegedly may have provided to authorities, such as the Senate, false answers to questions put to the Ombudsman’s Office about applications made against agencies.

This Office served on the Steering Committee, with other watchdog authorities, for research into whistleblowing that simply assumed at the start that watchdog authorities including the Ombudsman’s Office were meeting their responsibilities towards whistleblowers, rather than include this issue in the research;

• Allegedly this Office may have failed to investigate complaints against agencies;
• Allegedly this Office may have referred complaints against agencies to those same agencies to independently and impartially investigate themselves; and
• Allegedly this Office may have moved from just profiling agencies for the number and types of complaints made against agencies, to profiling complainants for the complaints that have been made, thus raising concerns that this profiling allegedly may be used, rather than the merits of the complaints, in deciding whether and how to respond to the complaints from complainants already profiled.

Military Justice Agencies

These agencies include entities such as Offices of the Inspector-General, Investigation Service and Whistleblower Schemes, acting directly in the role or advising Commands, Formations and / or Units. Alleged practices include:

1. Allegedly write excuses for alleged reprisals into the terms of reference for inquiries into these alleged reprisals;
2. Allegedly take several years to undertake investigations;
3. Allegedly appoint inquiry officers with conflicts of interest in the matter under investigation;
4. Allegedly assign investigations or inquiries of allegations against Chiefs and senior officers to subordinate officers, or to career officers of much lower rank;
5. Allegedly refuse the whistleblower access to witness statements, and make claims about the whistleblower or the disclosure made by the whistleblower that may be a distortion of the content of those statements;
6. Allegedly require the whistleblower to refuse protections against alleged reprisals if the disclosed wrongdoing is to be investigated;
7. Allegedly fail to investigate matters alleged, or act to investigate in lieu matters not alleged;
8. Allegedly trick whistleblowers into general matter or scoping interviews, with the promise of a future detailed interview, but then refuse the detailed interview, with the claim that the member already had received an interview;
9. Allegedly refuse detailed reasons for findings, and/or force whistleblowers to other military procedures for which a right to detailed reasons does not exist;
10. Allegedly force whistleblowers to court action to obtain procedures already required of the military authorities by military regulations and instructions;
11. Allegedly engage in psychological vilification of whistleblowers based on rough justice findings against the whistleblower (e.g. findings made without any formal process and without a hearing to which the whistleblower was given an opportunity to give evidence or rebut allegations);
12. Allegedly categorise a whistleblower as a serial whistleblower on the basis of two disclosures made from eight to thirty years apart;
13. Allegedly banning whistleblowers from whole career employments purportedly not because they were whistleblowers but because they were serial whistleblowers; and
14. Allegedly refusing whistleblowers the protection of a case officer, or a case officer of sufficient rank, where disclosures of alleged wrongdoing have been made about Chiefs and/or former Chiefs holding prestigious public positions.
15. Allegedly refusing complainants proper complaint procedures on the basis of ‘doorway’ exclusion rules – complaints of reprisal are refused or complaints procedures downgraded because the complaint is held to have been made using the incorrect procedure – the whistleblower used the wrong doorway for lodging the complaint
16. Allegedly falsely claiming that the wrong ‘doorway’ was used by a complainant when submitting the complaint

Commonwealth Ombudsman & Military Justice authorities

Alleged practices include:

1. Allegedly, the refusal by one authority to investigate a disclosure on the basis that a second authority was investigating the matter, and a refusal by the second authority to investigate the matter on the basis that the first authority was investigating the matter.

Fair Works Commission

Under development

Registered Organisations Commission

Under watch