Jane Hume (Victoria, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Treasury Laws Amendment (Enhancing Whistleblower Protections) Bill 2017. As I mentioned earlier, Australia's current private sector whistleblower laws are fragmented and confusing, and civil remedies are extraordinarily limited. At the moment, claimants are exposed to legal cost risks and have great difficulty in discharging the evidential burden in proceedings for compensation in relation to reprisals. Offences that have been committed against whistleblowers have rarely been prosecuted. Companies have been practically prohibited from undertaking investigations as they could not share information related to the disclosure, regardless of whether it identified the whistleblower or it did not. In fact, anonymous disclosures were not allowed, and neither were emergency disclosures, either to the media or to parliamentarians.

The changes that we've made with this bill remedy those deficiencies. There are a number of protections that are strengthened by this bill. The changes include expanding the protections to a much broader class of people. They expand the types of disclosures that will be protected under the framework; they allow emergency disclosures to parliamentarians and the media in certain circumstances, but only if certain preconditions are satisfied; and they make it easier for a whistleblower to seek redress for detriment or for damage. The new protections create new civil penalties to make enforcement action easier and increase criminal penalties. They also require all large companies to have a whistleblower policy, with penalties for failing to do so.

There are also new whistleblower protections in the taxation law, which are broadly consistent with those changes already outlined in the Corporations Act. The key difference between the corporate and tax whistleblower regimes are that all types of entities, including individuals, bodies of persons, partnerships and trusts are covered by the tax regime. Also, eligible recipients under the tax regime differ from the corporate tax regime due to the nature of the information that is being disclosed—for example, tax and BAS agents of entities are eligible recipients under the tax regime—and the tax regime does not contain equivalent provisions to the corporate regime relating to emergency and public interest disclosures. Also, the tax regime doesn't explicitly exclude personal work related grievances from protection because the scope of the tax whistleblower regime is already limited to disclosures about tax affairs. I commend the bill to the Senate.