Protected Disclosures (Protection of Whistleblowers) Bill

The Protected Disclosures (Protection of Whistleblowers) Bill interrupted debate on third reading.

💬 Jo Luxton: Mr Speaker?

When the House last considered this bill, we had completed call No. 7 and we’d come to call No. 8. I call Jo Luxton. [Members cheer]

Thank you, Mr Speaker. As you can see, I am extremely pleased to stand and take a call on this piece of legislation. I have been waiting for my turn to speak on this so many times already.

This piece of legislation is a fantastic piece of legislation. It replaces the current law, which is now 20 years old, does not work as well as it should, people don’t know how to use the Act, and they don’t feel safe using it. The biggest hurdles we hear about are with people reporting disclosures, because they don’t know companies’ policies for reporting it and they fear retaliation. I feel that this is extremely true when it comes to, perhaps, women in workplaces—there’s a lot of power play that can happen. Migrants are exploited and they’re not confident that the report will go to somebody that will actually do something about it. These are real barriers—real barriers—to the ability of people to be able to report disclosures.

I think that this piece of legislation is absolutely crucial to ensure that people feel safe, they know they can report disclosures, they understand the process, and they know that there will be no chance of retaliation. I absolutely commend this bill to the House.

This is a split call. I call Chris Penk—five minutes.

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. It’s a pleasure to—I wasn’t perhaps as keen as the member opposite, Jo Luxton, to get up and take my call ahead of time, but I can at least do so now that I have the opportunity, in the fading of the light of the House sitting week. The Protected Disclosures (Protection of Whistleblowers) Bill, as the previous contributor has noted, is one that has almost been concluded, in terms of this reading, a number of times now that the House has sat, so it’s a pleasure to be able to help bring it home, so to speak, even before we head home.

The discussion in previous stages of the bill, in, obviously, its various readings—and also, I recall, quite an interesting, I think, and helpful, if I may say, committee of the whole House stage. I do so with all due modesty, as I think I recall that I was one of those who was willing and able to make a few contributions. I do acknowledge that the Minister at the time was engaging seriously in that discussion, and so I think that having followed a parliamentary process where, of course, all the usual boxes are ticked, we did also, I think, do ourselves a service as a committee of the whole House, and now the House proper, of giving it some pretty thorough scrutiny. That’s important, and it’s in an area, of course, for all legislation, but particularly so where there’s an opportunity for people to exercise rights and responsibilities in the face of possible wrongdoing.

I note, of course, that the regime is intended to provide protection of whistleblowers, as, indeed, the name of the bill suggests in that part of the description in brackets, which is so helpful to have a general kind of understanding of it, and, of course, as a learned member made the point at a previous stage—it may have been me—it’s not only the whistleblowers who are being protected, important as such protection for such people may be, but it is also, of course, the protection of the systems of which they are a part. It’s the protection of the rule of law to some extent, but it’s also a protection of members of the public who would otherwise suffer harm or potential harm at the hands of the individual or organisation on whom the whistle is being blown.

So it is that the bill has a number of mechanisms to promote that kind of accountability to provide that further protection, and it does so by clarifying the threshold at which such whistleblowing can take place and, more importantly, the protections that are then unlocked or provided when the whistle is blown. We have some specific reference to serious risk to the health or safety of an individual, and I think it’s pretty clear from that that Parliament intends that there’s a threshold that is not trivial but that there is something serious—to use that word again—that is at play, such that we would want to say as a society that we’re going to enable someone to blow the whistle and to cause, potentially, distress and harm to the reputation of others.

Of course, we do that because we say that there’s an overall benefit in having such a regime. We say that the interests of society at large, and the whistleblower in particular, in such cases outweigh the rights of those who might be accused of wrongdoing, and, of course, the reason that we need such laws is because it’s not always the case that, when whistleblowing takes place, the wrongdoing is able, actually, to be proved. So other aspects of the legal system, whether it be contractual, perhaps in an employment context particularly; or it might be in relation to individual reputation so that defamation laws, potentially, are engaged; or privacy laws, of course—all these complex issues can interact such that we have need for someone who, in good faith and not using whistleblowing as a means to cast aspersions unfairly or in bad faith, uses these provisions to highlight what they consider to be wrongdoing in the service of preventing serious risk to the health or safety of an individual.

So I do want to say, in my remaining time, that I think that the bill has had a good canvassing at its various stages. National has been clear that we do support it. We commend the Government for continuing this work. We acknowledge that some further work may be needed, and the Greens have made that point. We look forward to, potentially, continuing that further discussion, but, of course, after this bill has passed, as it will surely soon be in the next sitting week.

Members, this debate is interrupted and set down for resumption next sitting day. The House stands adjourned until 2 p.m. on Tuesday, 10 May 2022. Mauri ora.

Debate interrupted.

The House adjourned at 4.57 p.m.