Human Rights Watch supports the Whistleblower Protection Authority Bill 2025[1] (“the bill”) as a step towards a stronger legal framework for protecting public interest whistleblowing in Australia.
This bill establishes a federal Whistleblower Protection Authority – a statutory authority responsible for providing information, advice, assistance, guidance, and support to whistleblowers and potential whistleblowers. The authority would also be empowered to investigate the mistreatment of whistleblowers and undertake enforcement activities as necessary.[2]
Transparency International Australia, the Human Rights Law Centre, and Griffith University’s Centre for Governance and Public Policy, recently published a report, “Design Principles for Australia’s Federal Whistleblower Protection Authority,” which outlines the need for an authority and a blueprint for how it should be designed.[3] Human Rights Watch supports the bill, which largely aligns with these design principles.
Need for Whistleblower Safeguards
Human Rights Watch has long called for Australia to introduce safeguards to protect journalists, human rights activists, lawyers, whistleblowers, and others making disclosures in the public interest.[4]
In 2020, Human Rights Watch warned that Australia’s sweeping national security laws and police actions against journalists and whistleblowers were having a chilling effect on freedom of expression. Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which Australia ratified in 1980, guarantees the right to freedom of expression, including the right to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas of all kinds.[5]
The bill should protect whistleblowers from retaliation for disclosures that are made in the public interest. In the past three decades there has been only one case in which compensation was paid under any of Australia’s dedicated whistleblower protection laws.[6]
In 2022, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders, Mary Lawlor, noted some of the severe dangers whistleblowers face:
“Whistle-blowers are often in severe danger when they expose corruption. Some risk their career, their livelihoods and sometimes their personal safety to expose wrongdoing that threatens the public interest. They may be fired, sued, blacklisted, arrested, threatened or, in extreme cases, assaulted or killed. States should do more to enact meaningful protections for whistle-blowers and encourage more people to publicly expose corruption.”[7]
She said safeguards to protect whistleblowers were often weak or non-existent and called on states to “[p]rioritize the adoption and implementation of legislative and other measures to protect informants and whistle-blowers.”[8]
Human Rights Watch strongly supports the passage of the Whistleblower Protection Authority Bill 2025 to increase the protection safeguards for whistleblowers in Australia.
Footnotes:
[1] Whistleblower Protection Authority Bill 2025 (No. 2).
[2] Ibid.
[3] Transparency International Australia, Human Rights Law Centre and Griffith University’s Centre for Governance and Public Policy, “Design Principles for Australia’s Federal Whistleblower Protection Authority,” https://www.hrlc.org.au/app/uploads/2025/06/250618-Whistleblower-Protection-Authority-Design-Principles.pdf (accessed June 24, 2025).
[4] Human Rights Watch, “Submission to the Universal Periodic Review of Australia,” July 2020, p. 9, https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/media_2020/09/HRW_UPR_Australia%20_July2020.pdf.
[5] International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, adopted 16 December 1966, entered into force 23 March 1976, 999 UNTS 171, art. 19(2).
[6] “Design Principles for Australia’s Federal Whistleblower Protection Authority,” p. 6.
[7] United Nations, Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders, "At the heart of the struggle: human rights defenders working against corruption," 23 December 2021, https://docs.un.org/en/A/HRC/49/49, para. 82 (accessed June 24, 2025).
[8] Ibid., para. 117(j).
