Last year, ATO debt collection officer Richard Boyle made an extraordinary series of disclosures to the ABC, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age detailing allegations of deeply unethical business practices and a toxic work culture inside the Australian Taxation Office. While that investigation led to changes within the ATO, it turned Boyle’s life upside down — his house was raided by the Australian Federal Police, and he now faces 66 charges and a prospective 161-year jail sentence.
Attorney-General Christian Porter has so far resisted calls to intervene and advise the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions to drop the charges. Boyle’s prosecution comes just months after the Morrison government passed a significant series of protections for corporate whistleblowers, but he is largely not protected by these laws.
What were the recent reforms?
The Treasury Laws Amendment (Enhancing Whistleblower Protections) Bill 2018, which passed in February this year, brought in significant reforms to whistleblower laws that came after a decade of trying.
In 2009 Labor’s Chris Bowen proposed a review into corporate whistleblower protections, but the reform was eventually tossed in the “too hard” basket amid the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government’s 2013 self-immolation. Then in 2017, then-financial services minister Kelly O’Dwyer helped get support for reform.
The changes expanded the range of people eligible to make disclosures and the kinds of matters they can make disclosures about. This included corporate corruption, bribery and fraud. The bill included a requirement that all public and large proprietary companies develop a whistleblower policy. It also harmonised the previous regime, which had been a patchwork of different provisions scattered across various pieces of legislation, by bringing whistleblower protection substantially within the scope of the Corporations Act.
Why isn’t Boyle protected?
The government’s recent changes were too little too late for Boyle. Firstly, they came into effect after he’d been subject to AFP raids, and been charged — a process that Boyle says took a severe toll on his physical and mental health.
But the new laws also likely exclude disclosures like Boyle’s. While protections were made for emergency or public interest disclosures which have been made to journalists, tax matters are excluded from protection under these sections. Further, while the new laws inserted whistleblower amendments into the Taxation Administration Act, these changes do not extend protection for disclosures to a journalist.
Meanwhile the Public Interest Disclosure Act, which governs disclosures like the kind Boyle made, does not create express protections for providing information to a journalist.
The secrecy state
The prosecution of Boyle is just the latest example of Australia’s long war on information. As was the case across many Western countries, Australia’s expansion of secrecy laws was triggered by post-9/11 fears about the spectre of terrorism. But Australia has gone harder than most, and since 2001 we’ve enacted more than 50 anti-terror laws — a number that experts say would have been “unthinkable” prior to 9/11.
While the Coalition government was developing whistleblower protection reforms, it also passed sweeping national security and espionage laws — aimed at stifling Chinese influence in Australia — which expanded the definition of “national security” and established potential jail terms of up to 10 years for journalists for dealing with sensitive information related to it.
In 2015, Peter Dutton introduced changes to the Border Force Act which would have subjected doctors and other people working in offshore detention centres to up to two years in prison for making disclosures about conditions in the camps. The Home Affairs Minister only backed down after the threat of a High Court challenge. Still, Australia’s offshore processing regime is subject to considerable sensitivity, and journalists investigating detention centres have previously been investigated by the AFP over disclosures that were potentially unauthorised under the Crimes Act.
The Commonwealth’s decision to prosecute Boyle is also nothing new. Currently, the Commonwealth is bringing highly secret and protracted criminal proceedings against Witness K, the intelligence official who disclosed Australia’s bugging of Timor-Leste’s embassy, along with his lawyer Bernard Collaery.
Meanwhile, UN official Nick Melzer accused the Australian government of complicity in the psychological torture of WikiLeaks founder and controversional whistleblower Julian Assange. Assange, an Australian citizen, is currently facing extradition to the United States over leaking government material.
Boyle’s case is increasingly looking a reversion to the norm in Australia; another chapter in the government’s steady expansion of the security state.
Richard Boyle will be speaking to 7.30 tonight, and is due to face court this week.
This Boyle case is another outrageous and overt attack, sponsored if not conducted, by this secretive and selectively repressive government on the fundamentals of democracy. Is not the ATO ‘our’ ATO? Is it not in the public interest that the way it works is transparent?
As in the case of Witness K and Bernard Collaery, the revelation of criminal and unethical behaviour is characterised as a much more serious crime than the crimes revealed. The general silence of the media damns them as irrelevant. All the main media organisations seem to be interested in is rationalising the erosion of democratic freedom, honesty and ethics.
And where have Labor and The Greens been on these disgraceful stories?
Has Stalin been re-incarnated and advising the Australian government?
I am becoming increasingly disgusted by the organised destruction of everything that is/was good about Australian democracy.
This situation can be extended to Wikileaks too. The Australian government, as a subsidiary of the US government, will go to any lengths to protect their dirty washing, and along with the UK will protect each others dirty washing.
The AFP investigating anything is laughable. They never discovered who in Downer’s office leaked the Wilkie ONA Top Secret classified report on Iraq to Andrew Bolt on the weekend 20-23 June 2003. How Bolt wasn’t charged with receipt of a classified document, under the Crimes Act, also remains an unsolved mystery.
Bolt is #ScottyTheGaslighter’s official brown noser.
God forbid! Was Boyle trying to do anything other than improve the system/morale?
Now the AFP is unchained to savage favourites again?
As for government, if you’ve got nothing to hide, nothing to be embarrassed about in your actions, why act like you have?
Like an iceberg – if this is the tip, what lies beneath?
[…. “lies” being the operative word.]
“Behold, the toxic reality of the Coal-ition’s ‘serendipetous government’.”
‘… since 2001 we’ve enacted more than 50 anti-terror laws — a number that experts say would have been “unthinkable” prior to 9/11.’
Ergo the September 11 attacks did not merely destroy iconic US buildings & several thousand lives but they hit a bigger target by white anting western society.
“Terrorism can’t win ……”
Our leaders repeated time and time again that we must not let terrorism change our way of life … and then proceeded to introduce a continuous stream of draconian laws that changed our society for the worse in order to protect us from the never ending threat of terrorism. And that roll out of draconian laws will continue.
Sugar is a far bigger risk to our lives than terrorism is or was, yet the government has done nothing to effect a reduction in sugar in our diets to save lives .. but then it isn’t about saving lives is it.
Your piece is about the importance of whistleblowing protection for disclosures to journalists. Is Boyle charged for that?
Or is he charged for improperly accessing taxpayer information, and for improperly collecting taxpayer information, that is confidential?
If Boyle succeeds in nobbling the charges, we’ll never know what he is actually accused of. The ATO may only disclose what evidence testing the charges requires, and in the proceedings about the charges.
The beat-up about collection of tax debts never had any substance. The belated whistleblower statement by Boyle was thought insubstantial in ATO review; was essentially baseless according to the Inspector-General of Taxation; and now lacks any substance in the report of the Auditor-General.
But breathless reporting of the ATO breaching ‘model litigant’ standards, based on one appeal judge in one Federal Court case, managed to ignore that the other two judges strongly asserted that the ATO had behaved as a model litigant in that case and contradicted the lone dissenter.
Now we have equally breathless reporting that a whistleblower is being punished – before the ATO can put before the public what the basis for the charges actually is.
redfernhood: Your defence of the ATO is very legalistic. You are right, in my view, about the technical presentation of evidence.
But I suggest that you are missing the crucial point here. What Boyle has revealed is the aggressive way in which the ATO is monstering all sorts of small businesses for taxes the victims admit and commit to pay as they can.
I have direct knowledge of 2 cases in which the tactics of the ATO can only be described as the deployment of deliberate financial violence against the ‘enemy’, the hapless tax payer honestly committed to paying their taxes, albeit ‘late’. It is deliberately violent because of the real damage it does to real humans, of which the ATO is acutely aware. That is a deliberate tactic – pressure the enemy until you get complete capitulation.
This not a merely ‘legal’ matter. It is about the way by which an organisation, for whom we collectively pay the total cost, is attacking citizens. And the bloke who blew the whistle is set upon by the same organisation with ferocious violence. Spare me the technicalities of court process. I know them too.
If Boyle is convicted, god help us all.
well exactly. As soon as daily targets were mentioned we know there is something terribly wrong with the process. Why are Public Services now behaving like rapacious corporations?
There was more than a decade of stories coming out of the ATO suggesting bullying tactics, going hard after little guys while meek with the big end of town with government connections.
As far as the ATO is concerned, it doesn’t really matter when someone pays their tax as much as them acrually paying it. Penalries are in place for late payment. Get your hand off it.
Unless some executives in the ATO have to meet KPIs about getting revenue in on time, which is really peripheral and another abuse of the dreaded state of establishing accountability at senior levels.
This is just a witch hunt. Just throw him in the river and if he doesn’t drown, he’s a witch.