The management of disclosures and their challenges

Speaker:
Chris Wheeler
Deputy Ombudsman, NSW Ombudsman

Abstract:
From 14 years of experience advising public officials who have responsibilities for dealing with whistleblowers and their disclosures, and from many discussions with other professionals working in this area, there appear to be a number of misconceptions still commonly associated with whistleblowing.

The presentation discusses a number of these misconceptions, including:

• whistleblowers are generally troublemakers — disaffected members of staff who are more trouble than they are worth
• whistleblowers make their disclosures out of a sense of disinterested public duty and should have little or no emotional investment in or expectations about the outcome
• little or no information about an investigation should be disclosed to a whistleblower if this could prejudice the investigation
• confidentiality is of paramount importance — an essential requirement for the protection of the whistleblower
• once a person has ‘blown the whistle’ they are untouchable within the workplace, even if they are consistently underperforming or were actually implicated in a misconduct, maladministration, etc. and
• where workplace conflict arises out of a disclosure, it is the whistleblower who in each case should be relocated, or alternatively it is the subject(s) of the disclosure that should always be relocated.