From Schwartz Media. I'm Ashlin Macgee. This is seven am. There's been another strike against whistleblowing. Richard Boyle was a tax office employee when he raised concerns internally about a scheme to garnish overdue taxes directly from people's bank accounts, and when that didn't work, he told journalists. But accord to Adelaide, yesterday upheld a ruling that he's not a whistleblower, which means he now has no defense for leaking that
confidential information. Today Mcquarie University professor of journalism and whistleblower advocate Peter Grestor on why the government talks big on open democracy but hasn't acted to fix the system. It's Thursday, June twenty Peter. Richard Boyle's been in and out of court for a few years now. His case hasn't even gone to trial yet, though. Remind us why he is in this position.
Yeah, it's a pretty tragic, troubling story. I think about five or six years ago, Richard was working as a tax official in the office, the ATO office in Adelaide, and he saw what they're called garner she notices, which are automatic notices that the office is able to issue to banks to give them money from people that owe them tax without getting clearance from the people themselves, the taxpayers themselves, and at one level that strictly speaking, that's legal,
but it was putting enormous pressure on individuals who caught themselves in all sorts of strife, businesses that were struggling to deal with some of the things that businesses normally deal with, and who were happy to cover the bills but just couldn't deal with the kind of pressure of a whacking break big tax bill at that point, and Richard felt that that was highly unethical. He made a complaint or reported the problem to his superior They dismissed
the issue. He then went to the media, to the ABC, and he took some recordings as evidence of what the Tax Office was doing.
Tonight, we meet people who say their lives have been destroyed by the heavy handed tactics of the ATO. Among them is a whistleblower who describes a toxic culture driven by revenue targets and KPIs that staff likened to a cash grab.
Richard was soon after out it as the source.
Last week and the lead up to our program, his home was raided by the ATO and the federal police.
Yeah, it came with quite a shock.
Richard and his wife were in their Adelaide apartment early in the morning, just getting ready to go out. I think Richard had just been in the shower, and the AFP came in, barged in with handcuffs and weapons and so on, and started going through his draws, personal belongings, documents, pretty much everything, and dragged him off for questioning.
Seems very vindictive that they would do this, use public resources, massive amounts of public resources to investigate someone who's blown the whistle because uneffeole behavior in the strange taxation office.
And he's been on trial ever since for illegally taking tax office records, illegally recording the details of taxpayers.
Now, strictly speaking, that's true.
He did make those recordings, he did keep those documents, he did pass them on. But what Richard and a whole bunch of supporters, including myself, have been arguing is that it was an essential part of the whistleblowing process. And in the end, the ATO was forced to look at its processes, look at how it was using Ganashee notices and acknowledged that they were abusive and harmful and causing a lot of people enormous stress, and it changed its practices.
As countless subsequent inquiries, including from this Chamber, have conclusively found this was the Tax Office rogodeb And while that Role Commission has just finished with damning findings against the scheme's authors, Richard is the only one from the Tax offers facing legal sanction.
So we're in this rather crazy situation of a guy exposing something that had to be exposed, that was causing enormous pressure that the government has changed. But the guy that exposed that is now being prosecuted for the act of blowing the whistle, and that strikes me as pretty tragic.
Richard was back in court in Adelaide yesterday morning talk me through what's happened.
So Richard had originally argued that he was he should be immune from prosecution under whistleblowing legislation, which allows whistleblowers to be protected if they're exposing things in the public interest.
Judge judgment in this case found that whistleblowing laws only provided narrow protection to Richard. Boyle only protected the actual act of disclosure, not his conduct in preparing to speak.
Into Now Richard lost that appeal, or lost that argument rather, and so he went to the South Australian Court of Appeal and it was the Court of Appeal that has heard his argument and they threw that appeal out. So Richard now has to face trial and potentially quite a few years behind bars if he loses it.
Tell me a little bit more about that whistle blow a protection he was asking for. What does it mean for people when they're facing these kinds of charges, all these kinds of cases.
What it's supposed to do is give public servants the power of the ability to expose misdeeds within government if what they're doing is in the public interest. Remember they are literally public servants. They're supposed to be serving us, not the government. And pretty sure everyone recognizes there is an enormous power imbalance between individuals and the state, and when the state is abusing that power, then we need whistle blowers who have the capacity to expose those things
in the public interest. Now, the Attorney General Mark Dreyfuss has acknowledged quite some time ago that whistleblower protections simply aren't working because we see cases like Richard's and David McBride, who was the whistleblower that exposed allegations of war crimes by Australian's Special forces. He just went to prison a month or so ago, which is also pretty tragic, and the Attorney General has promised to reform the whistleblower protections and increase the public interest defense.
The Albanezer government is committed to restoring trust and integrity to government and an effective public sector whistleblowing framework is essential to achieving this, including to support disclosures of corrupt conduct to the National Lady Corruption Commission.
Now, we had hoped that Richard would be able to lean on that public interest defense in this particular case, and.
I argue that he was acting on behalf of all of us.
What we saw yesterday was I think a very serious blow to anybody than any public servants who might be seeing wrongdoing and thinking about following Richard's example. This is going to have a very very chilling effect I think on whistle blowing and I think on press freedom. Richard really, which is one of my big concerns. I think judges tend to look at the very narrow detail of what they did wrong in the law, and the law is very clear and way that against a sort of rather
mushier ideal around the public interest. And what we're seeing in Australia repeatedly happen is that the judges say, well, I can see that you broke this law very very clearly, and so I've got no real option but to find you guilty of that offense. That's what we saw happen
in David McBride's case. Again, we've all been arguing, myself and a whole bunch of others who've been supporting the whistleblowers have been arguing that that public interest needs to be taken into account and the courts just don't seem to have the capacity or the world.
To do it.
After the break, why the government seems to be all talk and no action, Peter, The Albanese government says it is committed to transparency. It says things should improve for whistleblowers. You laugh, Tell me why you're laughing.
Yeah.
I remember Mark Drevers before the last election, published on his own website a very clear statement that he was committed to transparency, to improving whistleblower protections, to making sure that the government worked for the people, not for itself.
I have a near permanent interest in whistleblower protection, you know.
To his credit, I suppose Mark Dravis has also gone through a process of reviewing whistleblower legislation.
Now, looking at the suggestions that have come in from the public, from other members of Parliament about what further reforms are needed for our whistle blower protection scheme, and I'm looking forward to enacting those.
But these two cases, in particular, Richard Boyles and David McBride's been so emblematic that we've felt that it's really important that the Attorney General follow up that rhetoric and act on these two cases and withdraw the prosecutions. By not following through, I think it sends a really bad message. It suggests that the government just isn't serious about following through on all of those promises, and I think that's a very bad look. But I think it's also really
important that we underlie. We remind our politicians, we remind our public servants that they're supposed to work for us. We are their employers. You know, when we pay our taxes, we pay their wages. When we go to vote, we effectively decide who we're hiring.
To run.
They work for us, not the other way around. That means that they need to be accountable to us. And the mechanisms that we do that, partly are through the courts, through all sorts of oversight bodies, but also through the press. And we cannot do that if whistleblowers are being prosecuted for going to the press. That is an essential mechanism, an essential safety valve which keeps our system of democracy honest, and at the moment it's just not working.
And so Peter, what is the fix here? If the courts are following the law, how does the law need to change? What does it look like in an ideal situation?
The law needs to give far greater emphasis to the public interest defense. It needs to recognize that there is a very potent need, a very important democratic need, to give whistleblowers that defense and make sure that it is usable.
There are a couple of other steps that the law or that the government needs to do, and one of them is to set up an independent whistleblower authority that has the capacity to help whistleblowers navigate the very complicated legal mechanisms to make sure that they're able to stay on the right side of the law to give them advice and support and make sure that whistleblowers are protected
or punished. It's certainly something that would also signal the government's seriousness about supporting whistleblowing.
What do you think the Prime Minister's appetite is like for that?
The Prime Minister and the Attorney General very very forthright in opposition less so now. And you know, as we've seen in recent reporting, the Financial Review looking at a particular speech that the Prime Minister gave some time ago when he was in opposition about the importance of transparency and accountability. And so the vin Review discovered that that speech had magically disappeared from the Internet for a period until they started asking questions about it, at which point
it suddenly sort of surreptitiously popped back up again. Anyway, the Prime Minister's office dismissed that disappearing speech as a technical glitch. It's also hard not to see the coincidence here. But I want to give the government some credit for making the right noises and reviewing a lot of other pieces of legislation around secrecy and privacy and so on, which I think is helping. But at the moment, it looks far more cosmetic than it does realistic or practical.
A few years ago, you might remember when the Australian Federal Police rated two news organizations.
This was back in twenty nineteen.
The New York Times took a good, hard look at Australia's culture and they declared that Australia may well be the world's most secretive democracy. And that was not a flippant throwaway line. Think that was a serious piece of journalism. And you know, I've been looking hard at Australia's culture of secrets.
You know, I think I have to agree.
We have all sorts of provisions on paper that support openness and transparency, like whistleblower protections and freedom of information laws. But anybody who works with whistleblowers or FOI applications knows that they just don't work.
They are utterly dysfunctional.
And then since twenty nineteen, what we've seen are more restrictive laws that have been passed. Not less, we've passed more national security legislation since nine to eleven than any other country on Earth, almost one hundred separate pieces of legislation. Now I'm not saying that we shouldn't be upgrading our
national security laws to cope with the current environment. But huge numbers of those laws intrude on our civil liberties, in true, on our freedom of speech, intrude on press freedom, intrude on transparency in go and I think overall, it's actually shifted the balance of power in favor of government
away from us as individuals citizens. We need to be very, very careful when that happens, because it turns us more towards authoritarianism than towards a level democracy that we like to think of ourselves.
As you mentioned David McBride, who has been sentenced and is now in jail. We spoke to him just on the eve of his sentencing hearing.
Whatever happens today.
Put it this way, it'll be hard to choke back that years, because while it's not going to be completely over today, it is the end of a pretty long phase.
And you could hear the emotion in his voice and the toll that it's taken on him. Cases like this are hardly an ad for whistle blowing, are they.
No.
No, they're not put yourself in the position of a public servant who is sitting on some information about some wrongdoing that they're seeing in government, and on the one hand, their list to the Prime Minister and the Attorney General's rhetoric around protecting whistleblowers. And on the other hand you
see the experiences of Richard and David. You see how they've suffered financial ruin their careers, have been shot, at least one of them is already in prison, They've suffered enormous personal stress.
As a result of this.
The price that those guys have paid individually for doing what I think most of us would recognize as really heroic acts.
On behalf of all of us.
If you're a public seven sitting on information, what are you going to do? You're hardly going to think I'm going to go out there. Whistle Blowing does work in some places, but those two cases in particular, I think are very very bad advertisements for whistleblowing.
In this country.
Peter, thanks so much for your time.
It's fantastic to talk to Uston.
Also in the news today, state governments in Victoria and Queensland have rejected the nuclear policy announced by Peter Dutton yesterday, which would see nuclear power plants built at seven sites around Australia, including two in Queensland and one in Victoria. Peter Dutton, at a press conference yesterday announced the plan, promising it would provide cheap energy to households, but refusing to say when he would reveal the cost of it all.
And Russian President Vladimir Putin has visited the capital of North Korea, meeting with leader Kim Jong un, with the two expected to announce treaties strengthening ties between their two nations. The US State Department says it believes the visit is a sign of desperation on the part of the Russian president, looking to strengthen his remaining alliances after the invasion of Ukraine led to sanction and severed other diplomatic ties. That's all from the team at seven am for today. My
name is Ashlin McGee. Thank you for your company. I'll see you again tomorrow.