I think with any piece of legislation, it begins as a very good statement of legislative intent and very good objects. In all of the Australian legislation more or less, and certainly the ACT and the federal legislation, you will find very good, clear, and comprehensive objects. I think some of them have been repeated for the committee from the federal public interest disclosure act.
If all of those key objects are honoured in a clear and systematic way, which is intelligible for most whistle-blowers as well as for those administering the scheme, then it almost doesn't matter what the legislation looks like; it should work. That's one of the advantages of the ACT legislation. It's one of the great disadvantages of your legislation that it doesn't have very comprehensive objects, as well as all the tortuous complexity that it has.
I think it's good to be clear on the objects. The objects really need to be an overall object of supporting public integrity and accountability; facilitating disclosures at all levels through the system; ensuring that disclosures are properly dealt with, and investigated or responded to, at all levels of the system; and a clear object of protecting and supporting whistle-blowers.
I think if those are carried through properly in a simple and straightforward way by good draftspeople, then.... I'm not a big fan of copying other people's legislation. One of the beauties of the ACT legislation is that it happens to be well drafted by very competent draftspeople who went back to square one and designed a very good scheme.
I know you automatically look at the federal legislation, so you looked at our Public Interest Disclosure Act 2013. It's a very complex and pretty poorly drafted piece of legislation.
The committee should be aware that it was reviewed last year as part of the statutory review, similar to the one that you're performing now. There's a very comprehensive report in existence by a gentleman called Mr. Philip Moss, who was engaged by the government to conduct that review. He made specific recommendations for improving the act—many recommendations—but he also recommended that the government look at stripping the entire piece of legislation back to a simpler, more principle-based approach, like the best state or provincial legislation we have.
It's those sorts of assessments that make me come around to thinking you're in a situation where stripping it back to first principles is something you should be considering.