In Australia, there is an absence of practical legal protections for whistleblowers making the act of blowing the metaphorical whistle perilous at best. Australia is not alone in its treatment and lack of protection for whistleblowers.

Australia has a problem. What should be a robust democracy is falling behind. With the near collapse of “free and fearless” press, avenues to expose abuses of power have become harder to access in Australia’s post-digital disruption. News organisations are required to “do more with less.” These changes have been acutely felt by Australia’s whistleblowers – those willing to sidestep institutional and governmental authority in the public interest.

The centuries-old concept of parliamentary privilege has become the safest way for whistleblowers to leak sensitive, revealing, and sometimes damaging information on Australia’s rich and powerful. Most recently, David Pocock, Zoe Daniel, and Andrew Wilkie have used parliamentary privilege to give voice to whistleblowers. Pocock revealed an oil spill by mining and minerals giant Santos. Daniel revealed details leaked by a whistleblower in Victoria of children being kept in solitary confinement in a youth detention centre for 22 hours a day, while Wilkie tabled documents that showed misconduct in the controversial Hillsong Church. However, these parliamentary and senate pathways by nature are political and can lead to the hyper-politicalising of issues that would otherwise be viewed in more neutral terms.

Human Rights lawyer and advocate Kieran Pender argued in The Saturday Paper that this channel for whistleblowers was far from ideal. Pender said:

But whistleblowers shouldn’t have to turn to politicians for accountability when they witness suspected wrongdoing. Parliamentary privilege should be a safeguard of last resort. Whistleblowers should instead be empowered to make public interest disclosures under strong laws that protect them from losing their jobs or being sued for speaking up. Unfortunately, our laws offer little such protection.

Shadow Attorney General Mark Dreyfus was critical of the then government’s lack of legal protection for Australia’s whistleblowers. Dreyfus has put legislating whistleblower protection on his agenda, although what these laws might look like is still unclear. Pender continues:

The new laws need several features to be a success: a ‘no wrong doors’ model that helps whistleblowers no matter where they turn, or which point of entry they attempt in telling the truth; stronger protections and accessible remedies for whistleblowers who face retaliation; an enforceable positive duty on government agencies to protect whistleblowers; clearer channels for lawfully blowing the whistle to the media; and greater practical support for whistleblowers.

All too often, in countries where whistleblower protections are enshrined in law or constitution, a whistleblower’s existence conforms to the Hobbesian maxim of “nasty, brutish, and short.” Finding oneself on the wrong side of authority is akin to being thrown to the wolves. This is the world Tatiana Bazzichelli reveals in Whistleblowing for Change.

Bazzichelli brings together harrowing accounts of the plight of whistleblowers around the world. These stories reveal the plight of whistleblowers, their families, associates, and friends. Told in the first person, these tales are often very moving, leaving the reader in no doubt of the bravery. There is a lot to keep the reader interested in this book. However, if the whole is the combination of its sum parts, Whistleblowing for Change falls short. In trying to cover so much, Bazzichelli has put together a book that, while compelling, in many parts fails to hang together as a single coherent piece. Rather, this book is disjointed to the point of being jarring.

For this reason, it is a difficult read. The case studies leave the reader with a sense of righteous indignation and, on occasion, hopelessness. The contents alternate between compelling and disturbing case studies and academic abstraction, with the former being the strength of this book while the latter the weakness.

I recommend Whistleblowing for Change to readers who have an existing interest and knowledge about whistleblowing in the United States and Europe. Although this book is pitched to a global audience, it offers little of interest outside the North American and European context. The world is awash with Americans writing on how rotten the United States is. Despite this, there is an American exceptionalism here common across academia, and indeed the question that arises is, if this kind of thing is happening in the world’s bastion of freedom and democracy, how bad must the rest of the world be?

Ultimately, what this book demonstrates is that not every PhD makes a great book. In drafting laws protecting whistleblowers, there are plenty of resources at home and abroad Mark Dreyfus and his team can turn to. Sadly, Whistleblowing for Change is not one of them. If you are interested in how whistleblowing could work in Australia, you are better to turn to the work of Pender or Professor AJ Brown.

This is a review of Tatiana Bazzichelli (ed.), Whistleblowing for Change: Exposing Systems of Power and Injustice (Columbia University Press, 2021). ISBN: 9783837657937

Dr Richard Murray is a journalism researcher and educator at the University of Queensland. His research interests include the intersection of journalists, lawyers and the law, and regional and rural journalism. 

This review is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.