Logie JanJAN LOGIE (Green): Thank you Mr Speaker. It is a pleasure to rise to speak on the Protected Disclosures (Protection of Whistleblowers) Bill for the Green Party. We are supporting this piece of legislation. It is long overdue. The initial piece of legislation was written in 2000 and since that time we've had some really high-profile cases that have disturbed us as a country. Certain members of our Public Service in particular I think are the memorable cases because I think it goes to our sense of the integrity of our entire Public Service when people have managed to commit fraud despite flags having been raised by their colleagues at early stages of their offending and that they had managed to carry on for a significant period of time because our existing legislation from 2000 was not working effectively.It was in 2018 that the Public Service started a process of reviewing the legislation in the wake I think of a particular case. They were working across the Public Service and with the private sector collaboratively for 3½ years thinking about what was needed to get an effective protected disclosure regime. What we know is that this is a really critical and central piece of legislation in terms of ensuring integrity and safety for staff and for the confidence of the public in our Public Service and our businesses.The Greens are supporting this bill but we also have a differing view following the select committee process because frankly we are disappointed that after all of that work right across the Public Service and with the private sector what we've got in effect is a tidying up of the existing scheme which is out of step with the research on what the best protected disclosure schemes are around the world. We really would have loved to have seen us bring in best practice and we were given really clear evidence from Professor Michael Macaulay at the School of Government who is an expert on this and has looked at systems right across the world and provided the committee and the Government with advice on what we would need to do to have the best practice system in place and sadly it's not this.I heard Minister Woods in her opening speech acknowledge our differing view and say that these things are in the work programme and that other things have been raised at the select committee and will be followed up later. I want to reflect the frustration from the Public Service Association (PSA) representing the Public Service workers right across the country that all of their input has not been picked up already. They see this as an urgent issue and are frankly—and I don't think it is mischaracterising it to say—frustrated at the slow pace of change. I really want to bring into this discussion the fact that through the select committee process we heard submissions from people who had made protected disclosures and had had—and it is no overstatement to say—their lives absolutely destroyed. They had been vilified in their workplace. Lies had been spread about them. They had lost their jobs and their reputations were damned right across their industry and community. And some of those people had then years later gone through the system to be proven right. So it wasn't just a case of We're taking their word on it." They had eventually managed to get confirmation of their rightness of raising that concern.But justice delayed—I think is a timely kind of saying—is justice denied. There is no point in being validated years later after your life has been destroyed and that is what we are trying to fix with this legislation. It goes partway to doing that the ability to make the complaint outside of your agency in the first instance is critically important because people do have that knowledge in relationships with their colleagues to in some instances be able to know if it's not going to be safe to raise the matter internally. We have to trust that knowledge and enable them to take it outside of the agency in that first instance.Also it does create more of a requirement to think about how you protect that person who is raising the complaint. But this is where a lot of our concern is—that there is not enough detail around that. We're told that it's being done but we were wanting this done in terms of the public sector in the first instance because of the importance of that for the work of the Government for all of our resources as a country our collective resource being used through the Public Service as well as our amazing international reputation in terms of transparency and integrity. We want to maintain that. So what we were recommending which was not our brilliant idea—it never is really; it was coming from the experts and Professor Macaulay in particular as well as the PSA—was the requirement for the public sector to have dedicated support persons for all people making disclosures a little bit like we have privacy officers right across the public sector. It's not a particularly difficult thing to require. We have a precedent for doing it. It can be done within the organisational structure but it puts a system in place with somebody who has training and focus on actually just supporting that person because doing a protected disclosure is a difficult thing. That is never going to be an easy situation. Those people need to know that they will have support. There should be a requirement for risk assessment to be done when people are talking about notifying of a protected disclosure or taking it—an assessment of the risk to them to be able to take whatever relevant actions are necessary to protect them from any retribution. There should be an appropriate triaging for disclosures consistent investigative protocols and a communication strategy that offers data on disclosures as well as just the processes. That's about giving people the confidence that the system will work for them because as we know the reason for this legislation is that the history shows that it does not.I would also say that the work that's been going on in terms of this Parliament and the Francis review in terms of cleaning up our act to make sure that this is a safe workplace for every person and the struggle of getting that actual change in behaviour and making this a safe workplace shows us the difficulty of that work. I suspect we should bring a bit more of that experience into our sense of urgency and the need for detail and depth to this work. Skirting over the surface will not deliver the change that we need and education and training should be mandatory for all staff as well as appropriate and transparent remediation strategy.I note that the Minister said—because we were calling for a specific agency which was the advice that was given to the select committee because in cases where retribution happens to people raising protected disclosures our systems are failing them. As I mentioned earlier the process and the time line for being able to get consideration and redress or a decision is just so long that it actively is causing harm and preventing people from raising issues. To say that a specific agency might just replicate that problem—I actually don't buy that. I think that's actually how you design the agency and you can quite easily avoid that. So we support this bill but with disappointment."