Page 1394 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 11 May 1994
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contains whistleblower provisions. Rather than lecturing the Opposition on what is wrong with this Bill, the Chief Minister should have informed herself on what is wrong with her own. There is no question that this Bill is far superior to the legislation the Government hurriedly cobbled together to tack onto the end of the public administration Bill only within the last few weeks.
There is clearly a need for this kind of legislation. There has been a series of royal commissions and other inquiries by State and Commonwealth governments over recent years that clearly indicate that this kind of legislation is necessary. The need almost invariably focuses at the administrative level. At the political level, I suspect that there are enough checks and balances, even today. At the end of the day, a politician who is in any way tainted with corruption or inappropriate behaviour has to confront the electorate every two or three years anyway. That is the ultimate place where a decision can be made. With people involved at the administrative level there is no such methodology, so we need to know what is going on there.
If there are people who are prepared to come forward and make it known when something is wrong, we have to give them the necessary protection. Very often when things are going on within the public sphere, even the accountability rules do not work. It is not so much what is revealed in terms of the accountability procedures that is important; it is what is not revealed, what is hidden. Superficially, you can come up with accountability criteria everybody can comply with that indicate that everything is okay because those responsible are told only what they need to be told to satisfy the accountability criteria and are not told what is going on sub-surface.
The Chief Minister raised a couple of questions. She said that this applies to only a limited number of people. Madam Speaker, this Bill applies to everybody, whether they are public servants or not public servants. I draw attention to clause 15, Making a public interest disclosure, which states:
Any person may make a public interest disclosure to a proper authority.
That includes people outside the public service as well as those inside it. As far as I am concerned, "any person" means any person, and it also means every person. So everybody is covered by this, whether they are inside the public service or outside it. If somebody outside the public service is aware of some corrupt conduct in terms of awarding a contract or the operation of a department or an agency in some fashion, they too can come forward under the provisions of this Bill. That is why I said that the Chief Minister clearly did not understand the Bill that is before her, even though she was apparently comprehensively briefed on it.
Secondly, she wants two bob each way. In one place she says that there is no provision for public disclosure. She said, in effect, "This Bill is not sufficiently prescriptive". In fact, it does provide for follow-up reports of an annual nature to tell everybody, including this Assembly, what is going on, so I do not know what sort of public disclosure you want. She said that this was not sufficiently prescriptive, but her very next comment was that in another place in the Bill it was overly prescriptive. Which does she want?
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