The SA District Court recently informed ATO whistleblower Richard Boyle that the laws drafted by attorney general Mark Dreyfus a decade ago, do provide immunity from civil, criminal and administrative liability in making his disclosure, but not for his actions in obtaining the evidence.
Boyle is being pursued by authorities over his having exposed the Australian Taxation Office as having wrongly commenced employing garnishee practices that were reserved for habitual tax breachers across the board in mid-2017, in an end of financial year effort to raise revenue.
Judge Liesl Kudelka outlined that if she’d followed Boyle’s argument to its logical end, it would amount to sanctioning a form of “vigilante justice”, as such an interpretation of the law would permit “unlawful conduct” ranging from the “minor to egregious”.
Yet, the whistleblower laws set out in the Public Interest Disclosure Act 2013 (Cth) are supposed to protect public servants aware of government corruption in putting together a disclosure to submit to their employer, as well as providing the path to take in blowing the whistle.
When Dreyfus was appointed to the position of AG for a second time following last May’s federal election, the Labor member inherited three controversial whistleblower prosecutions: ACT barrister Bernard Collaery, former ADF lawyer David McBride and Boyle.
However, Dreyfus dropped the case against Collaery last July. The chief lawmaker was able to do this via ...
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