By Dominic Giannini 

Whistleblowers could be paid for exposing wrongdoing under a radical proposal to curb corruption.

Centre for Finance and Security research fellow Eliza Lockhart said similar schemes internationally that offered economic incentives to expose corruption had resulted in more people coming forward.

“They increase the amount of actionable intelligence that’s provided to law enforcement agencies and they increase the amount of successful prosecution and financial recovery,” she said.

But they needed to be accompanied by adequate protection regimes, she said, which was something Human Rights Law Centre associate legal director Kieran Pender said was severely lacking in Australia.

Mr Pender pointed to nine federal whistleblowing regimes as well as state and territory legislation that complicated protections.

Commonwealth legislation also failed to adequately protect whistleblowers, with loopholes that include people not being covered for gathering evidence before blowing the whistle.

Richard Boyle, who exposed predatory debt collection practices in the Australian Taxation Office, will be sentenced on Thursday after pleading guilty to offences pertaining to him copying and obtaining information before going public.

“We’re not saying that whistleblowers should be able to break into safes to get documents,” Mr Pender said.

“But the reality is, if our whistleblowers go to a regulatory authority with a bare disclosure with no information, then the authority won’t be able to do much, and it’s more likely they’re not going to not take that forward.”

France, the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union all had some level of protection covering preparatory conduct, he said.

With only a third of people expressing confidence in the federal government in 2025, down from almost 60 per cent the year before, something needed to be done to restore trust, Transparency International CEO Clancy Moore said.

He called for lobbying reforms with almost four-in-five Australians believing the government is more influenced by the interests of big business than ordinary people.

“We need a Commonwealth legislated lobbying code with teeth that includes in-house lobbyists, peak bodies and industry associations to stop the revolving door that has seen almost every federal resources minister since 2001, go to work in the fossil fuel sector shortly after leaving parliament,” Mr Moore said.

The organisation has called for a minimum three-year cooling off period to stop MPs and political staff from entering lobbying, as well as the routine disclosure of ministerial diaries so the public know who they’re meeting with.

Transparency International ranked the federal government’s lobbying laws second-last in Australia with a score of 17 out of 100 – on par with the ACT and only ahead of the Northern Territory.

Queensland ranked the highest with 85, followed by South Australia on 58 and NSW on 50.

Its report into lobbying laws across the nation derides the Commonwealth for a lack of enforcement, penalties and lax disclosure requirements.

It pointed to 14 breaches of the federal government’s code of conduct over three years, all of which attracted no sanctions for those involved.

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