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‘Whistleblowers are suffering’: Lawyers renew calls to drop Collaery prosecution
As Bernard Collaery returns to the ACT Supreme Court for revealing that the federal government spied on neighbour Timor-Leste during tense negotiations, human rights lawyers have once again called for the prosecution to be dropped in its entirety.
Naomi Neilson
The proceedings for lawyer and whistleblower Mr Collaery returned before the ACT Supreme Court on Wednesday, 9 February, to hear the Attorney-General’s request to add further, secret evidence. This will support its attempt to reverse an ACT Court of Appeal judgment that denied the federal government a secret trial.
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Mr Collaery, who was charged in mid-2018, has continued to fight charges of conspiracy to breach a secrecy provision in the Intelligence Services Act and charges for breaching that provision by communicating with journalists about the Timor-Leste cabinet bugging almost entirely behind closed doors.
Commenting on Mr Collaery’s recent court appearance, Human Rights Law Centre’s senior lawyer Kieran Pender said: “Whistleblowers should be protected, not punished. There is no public interest in prosecuting whistleblowers, and certainly not in secret. The Attorney-General should drop the prosecution – it’s as simple as that.”
Mr Pender added that while consenting to the prosecution of whistleblowers, the federal government has “delayed reforming laws” that would protect those who wish to speak up about wrongdoing. Although successive governments have each promised to implement the recommendations from a 2016 independent review into the Public Interest Disclosure (PID) Act 2013, “there has been no progress”.
“Australia’s whistleblowers are suffering. Reform to the PID Act is long overdue. The Morrison government should start delivering on integrity reform promises, including fixing our broken whistleblower protection laws,” Mr Pender said.
In October, Mr Collaery won an appeal to overturn a decision to keep parts of his trial in total secrecy, with the Court of Appeal unanimously ruling that open justice is important to deter political prosecutions. Although some sensitive information will remain out of the public’s reach, the original decision accepted “six specific matters”.
This follows co-accused Witness K’s three-month suspended sentence after pleading guilty to his own charges in June 2021.
