Legislation

QWAG’s thesis is that the survival of the whistleblower is essential to all strategies for fighting corruption and for maintaining integrity in public service.

If the whistleblower survives, then so too does the disclosure, the evidence and the potential for others coming forward to corroborate the whistleblowers’s witness.

If the whistleblower does not survive, the disclosure is forgotten, the evidence is lost, and the possibility of others coming forwards is suppressed.

The material in the other parts of this website may indicate the concerns that QWAG holds, from its accumulated experience of State and Federal jurisdictions, about the strength of any genuine intent to deal with corruption found by any Australian government in its own ranks.

The primary indicator that the National Integrity Commission initiative is on that same path is the absence of any direction towards a separate body tasked only with the protection of whistleblowers.

The Whistleblower organisations in Australia have all adopted ‘the Sword and the Shield’ policy for whistleblower protection. The National Integrity Commission will be what is termed a Sword organisation, tasked with fighting corruption.

Sword organisations like the CCC, ICAC and Commonwealth Ombudsman Office have been most unsuccessful in protecting whistleblowers.

QWAG supports the need of a second organisation, independent of the first, tasked and empowered and resourced solely for the purpose of protecting whistleblowers, to ensure that the whistleblower survives (and that thus integrity can be preserved).

The Sword and the Shield Policy document is QWA’s leading piece of advice to Government should Government seek for any Integrity Commission [IC] to be successful. Any IC will not be successful without whistleblowers. It thus will not be successful without a Whistleblower’s Protection Body.

A Sword-type IC body may be turned into a process for corruption if whistleblowing is not encouraged and if whistleblowers do not survive.

Any such Sword or Shield body, if established, will immediately be challenged by the inadequacy of the legislation on whistleblower protection.

QWAG has recommended that the Federal Government analyse the longer standing legislation from Queensland as well as the young legislation from the Federal jurisdiction in deciding upon reforms.