Anti-corruption champion and former judge Tony Fitzgerald has warned that Australia’s whistleblowing laws suffer from “fundamental flaws” and are failing to properly protect those who speak out about wrongdoing.
Fitzgerald, who presided over the landmark 1989 inquiry into Queensland police corruption, has called for major and urgent reform to whistleblower laws, including a harmonisation of protections across the public and private sectors. He said current whistleblowing regimes left a “large gap between the role that legal protections are meant to play, in theory, and what is happening in practice”.
