TRANSCRIPT
David McBride, who provided documents to the A-B-C exposing alleged war crimes by Australian soldiers in Afghanistan, will soon learn his future.
The former military lawyer pleaded guilty to three offences in the A-C-T Supreme Court last year, and is back in court for a sentencing hearing.
Supporters of McBride gathered outside the court as he made his way in.
David McBride's crimes including stealing Commonwealth information and passing it on to the media.
Acting Legal Director with the Human Rights Law Centre, Kieran Pender, says McBride is the only person facing charges over the alleged war crimes he uncovered.
"David McBride pleaded guilty to giving documents to the ABC that formed the basis of the ABC's landmark Afghan Files reporting. Reporting which showed the public what had gone on in its name in Afghanistan, credible allegations of war crimes committed by Australian forces in Afghanistan. Today, he's being sentenced for that crime, a crime of telling the truth telling the truth about government wrongdoing committed in our name. But the first person facing jail for Australia's war crimes in Afghanistan is not the alleged war criminals but the whistleblower."
He initially pleaded not guilty, but changed that plea to guilty in November last year.
Mr Pender says McBride was forced to make that change due to legal technicalities.
"David McBride pleaded guilty for several reasons. One is that he effectively had already admitted that he had committed the crime. It was never any secret that he was the source of these documents. He had tried to rely on a whistleblowing defence. So under our whistleblowing law, in certain circumstances, you can blow the whistle lawfully to the media, and he said he'd done that. Unfortunately, that trial was at the last minute he had to withdraw that defense after a national security intervention by the federal government, and then similarly, an argument he ran any substantive trial, he lost that an argument that actually the public interest had a wider meeting and that he had acted in the public interest by exposing wrongdoing."
Labor promised to protect whistleblowers before the last election.
Former Senator Rex Patrick says the government hasn't come good on that commitment.
"Our whistleblower laws are broken. That's not something that I might say, that's something the attorney general would say. He has promised, going into the past election, that he would fix our whistleblower laws. Firstly, I'll point out he hasn't."
Greens senator David Shoebridge says the government needs to act now on these issues.
"In the lead up to last federal election, we saw the Labor Party criticising the Coalition for its ongoing attacks on whistleblowers. And yet here we are some two years into the Albanese government and they are desperately trying to put David McBride, one of the nation's highest profile whistleblowers in jail. This is a remarkable failure of leadership from the Labor government and shows just how many institutional barriers we face between getting the truth out the truth out to the public who have a right to hear that is in the institutional powers inside Canberra."
This isn't the first time a whistleblower has been prosecuted in the A-C-T Supreme Court.
Bernard Collaery [[ka-lare-ee]], a lawyer and former A-C-T Attorney-General, faced prosecution for his alleged involvement in exposing Australian wrongdoing in Timor Leste [[less-tay]] in the 2000s, where Australian spies allegedly bugged the country's cabinet.
The case against Colleary was abandoned after Attorney General Mark Dreyfus chose to discontinue the case, using powers under the Judiciary Act.
Bernard Colleary says whistleblower protections are largely supported by Australians.
"These issues are beyond the political divide. They're not part of the left or the right concepts of politics. They belong in values. And David reflects values. And I think the prosecution of myself reflected values that most Australian share. The great issue is that most Australians empathetic to whistleblower laws. Most Australians support whistleblowing, but government doesn't, apparently. And that's the disconnect."
Mr Pender says Australia needs to do more to protect whistleblowers.
"Australia was once a world leader in protecting whistleblowers and we've since really fallen behind. The government has committed to stronger whistleblowing laws. We need that commitment to come to fruition. But critically, we need support for whistleblowers around those laws. So our laws on paper are okay, they're not working in practice. But the critical missing piece of the puzzle is an independent body, a whistleblower protection authority, to oversee and enforce whistleblowing laws and support whistleblowers."
Mr Shoebridge says little has been done to address whistleblower protections since the last election.
"Civil society have worked with independents and myself as the Green's justice spokesperson to put forward multiple essential reforms to the Labor Party, such as putting in place a whistleblower commission, making the public interest Disclosure Act actually work for whistleblowers removing all of the trip hazards the whistleblowers face when they try and step through the existing whistleblower protections. But so far we've seen zero structural reform from Labor."
In a statement, a spokesperson for the Comnmonwealth Attorney-General, Mark Dreyfus, says the Government is committed to delivering protections for whistleblowers, the National Anti-Corruption Commission legislation contains strong safeguards to protect journalists’ sources, and the Government is currently working on a second stage of reforms to strengthen whistleblowing protections.
