Yes, you're clearly hungry for very specific answers rather than generalities, and I'll throw out a couple of them.
One we've mentioned already is what we call “interim relief” in the act. We first thought that was for the whistle-blower, and then we read it more closely and realized it was for those accused of carrying out the wrongdoing. They are fully protected—not a hair on their head could be touched while the process unfolds. There's nothing equivalent for the whistle-blower.
We suggest that you take that provision, and just change it a little bit to make that relief open to everybody, to all the parties: the alleged wrongdoer, the whistle-blower and the alleged reprisers. That seems to be a very simple thing to do. I don't think it's going to cost money. It seems fair.
The other thing you must do as you do that is to make that unconditional and immediate from the point that the disclosure is made and not under the control of the the Integrity Commissioner, at their discretion and late in the day after reprisals have occurred. I think that's perhaps a very simple way of turning the tables on this legislation, which had a different intent.
The other suggestion I'll make is a very specific one. It is that the ability to go public is often very constrained. There's a person in Australia, A.J. Brown, who has done some wonderful research over decades in this field and whom perhaps you're going to hear from.
His research showed that, in Australia, when looking across all the different states and the laws they had, some of the laws that didn't seem very well written were actually performing quite well. As they drilled down to try to figure out why, they realized it was due to one particular provision that appeared in several of them. It was basically that, if the system to investigate and protect the whistle-blower didn't work, then the whistle-blower could go public. It was defined this way: If it took too long, if they were told there was going to be no investigation or if they were told that nothing was going to happen, then they could go public after a certain length of time.
What that does is it kind of turns the tables. The typical strategy of the agencies that are supposed to be protecting the whistle-blower is to delay, to do nothing, to keep them in the dark and to reassure them that things are going along, and then nothing happens. Cases have sat in the Integrity Commissioner's office for literally years without attention.
It turns the table on them. What has happened in Australia is that the officials who are responsible realized that their worst nightmare—publicity—might result if they didn't go on and do their jobs and deal with the case. It doesn't cost money they don't currently have to do that either.