Hutchison Paul: Protected Disclosures Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Hutchison Paul: Protected Disclosures Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:653;Page:2758] 
Dr PAUL HUTCHISON (National—Hunua) 
: 
 I am glad of the opportunity to speak on the title of the Protected Disclosures Amendment Bill. I was quite interested to read the second reading speech of the Maori Party regarding this bill where the speaker Rahui Katene suggested that the title be the “Workplace Whistleblowing Bill”. I thought she was absolutely right-on; so often we do shroud our titles with terminology that the public find quite hard to understand. Undoubtedly Protected Disclosures Amendment Bill is quite correct technically because it is the amendment bill to the Protected Disclosures Act 2000 which was brought in at that time and reviewed by Mary Scholtens QC in 2003 and to the amendment Act of 2007. I thought Rahui Katene made an interesting point at that time because one of the problems with whistleblowing is that the public themselves are not aware of the facilities that are available. But one would hope very much that given this current reading there will be some publicity and that people in organisations up and down the country who have genuine grievances will have the opportunity to utilise the extra facilities and protections afforded by this bill. Maybe when the media are talking about it they might talk about it as the “Workplace Whistleblowing Bill” and I hope that it will be practical and applicable to all ranges of people through both public and private institutions. 
Once again I think it is important to reiterate the fact that the review by Mary Scholtens QC in 2003 was comprehensive and did lead to the amendments in 2007. When the amendment Act was brought in in about November 2007 the Government Administration Committee set about gathering submissions but for a whole year absolutely nothing happened under the previous Labour Government. That is how little Labour thought of the importance of a bill it is now trying very hard to politicise. Basically Labour did very little. It had plenty of opportunity to bring in the second and third reading but it failed to do so. So it is very satisfactory indeed that a new National Government—which is forward-looking and determined to put things right—has in the first 6 months managed to get this bill through and hopefully will have it passed into legislation within the next few weeks. 
There is no doubt that in genesis the whistleblowing legislation has gone through several decades of iterations. There is no doubt that several Governments have tried to wrestle with it; we can see that if we think of the fact that the Neil Pugmire incident occurred back in the 1990s. Then of course there were the more recent occurrences at Hawke’s Bay and even more recently at Otago—but I would not regard the latter as a whistleblowing incident at all. That was a situation where the chairman of the Otago District Health Board was required to ensure the efficient effective running of that board so that was quite different from the normally considered matter in which this legislation can be applied where someone in an organisation sees a wrong feels helpless to do anything about it and then may or may not go to the right person. This bill certainly affords a far greater certainty that anyone in an organisation will be assisted practically if he or she wishes to whistle-blow.