Locke Keith: Protected Disclosures Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Locke Keith: Protected Disclosures Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
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KEITH LOCKE (Green) 
: 
 I thank my colleague Darien Fenton for allowing me to speak at this time. I have another appointment. The Green Party supports the Protected Disclosures Amendment Bill. It will help to protect the genuine whistleblowers who expose serious wrongdoing in the public sector. 
Under the Act at the moment whistleblowers can meet a brick wall if they make a procedural mistake regarding the organisation whom to complain to or how to complain. If they make a procedural mistake then their complaint can be ruled out. One technicality is that whistleblowers have to refer specifically to the Protected Disclosures Act 2000. Now with this amendment bill such a technical mistake will not rule out their complaints. 
Whistleblowers will also be able—as the other speakers have indicated—to get help from the Ombudsman in a number of ways in terms of the procedures and how to carry the matter further if they reach some obstacle. The Ombudsman will be able to give whistleblowers help even before they make the disclosure if they want help prior to beginning the whole process. The Ombudsman can help further by investigating the issue on his or her own initiative or in coordination with the whistleblower or can refer the complaint to the relevant Minister. 
The complainant does not need to be absolutely sure of the situation before making the complaint. There has to be room for error because in many cases the whistleblower will get an inkling something is wrong or might have certain evidence that something is wrong but will not be absolutely sure of all the wrongdoing that has taken place. There might be a set of mirrors in the organisation and the wrongdoer is obfuscated and I think it is important that this does not hold up the investigation of the complaint by the proper people. 
The more assurance the whistleblower has that he or she is protected the better it will be for getting complaints into the system. We have found so far under the present Act that in the year 2006 there were only eight such whistleblower complaints. The reason for this low number is partly the potential whistleblowers’ lack of knowledge about procedures and what is possible and partly because the whistleblowers are not entirely confident that they will be protected—that is that their anonymity will be protected—which is important if they are to continue operating in the workplace or even in terms of their reputation outside the workplace. 
There is also the question of persecution. Any worker can be persecuted by the organisation’s management if it thinks the whistleblower is exposing something it does not want exposed. The whistleblower’s workmates may think that the reputation of a fine organisation is being sullied by the complaint and the whistleblower can be persecuted as a result. So protection is important if we are to encourage whistleblowing. 
In the original bill the problem was not helped by the channel of complaints having to go up through the hierarchy of the organisation to managers who could be at least in part responsible for the wrongdoing either directly through incompetence through not managing their affairs properly or even through looking the other way and not doing anything about wrongdoing by a subordinate. This bill will mean that complaints will not just be channelled up through the existing structure but that there will be a role for the Ombudsman. People can go to the Ombudsman and ask how to work through the process. 
It is important that volunteers are now included in the process because a lot of organisations use volunteers. Volunteers can recognise wrongdoing within an organisation and they should be able to whistle-blow too. Obviously non-governmental organisations use a lot of volunteers but so do State organisations such as the Department of Conservation. Volunteers should be able to be part of the whistleblowing process. 
All this is very important as the Bazley report on historic police wrongdoing indicated. If one reads that report one sees that a lot of what went on—the wrongdoing within the police at Rotorua etc.—happened because good police did not blow the whistle for reasons such as they did not feel they could they thought their careers would be affected because of mateship or whatever it was. A combination of things meant that the whistle was not blown and the situation got worse. 
Even in some of the discussions we are having now on whether things are going wrong in prisons it is important that we allow the maximum opportunity for whistleblowing rather than perhaps having some horrendous thing happen and then we debate it in Parliament. That situation could be short-circuited by people whistle-blowing at an earlier stage. 
This bill will help organisations to act more morally will hold them—particularly public organisations—to account and will make them more in accord with recognised codes of conduct. Thank you.