Restoring public trust in democratic institutions

Justine Nolan: Good evening, everybody. My name is Justin Nolan. I'm the director of the Australian Human Rights Institute at UNSW, and it's my real pleasure to welcome you here this evening for our conference. We're gathering tonight on the lands of the Gadigal people, and I pay my respect to their elders, past and present and any Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people here tonight.

The Australian Human Rights Institute UNSW was established in 2018 to support you and to use commitment to social justice. And the Institute serves as a practical mechanism for the University to contribute positively to the community through research, education and practice. At the Institute, we're really focused on developing practical and sustainable solutions to create change. We work with more than 180 academics and they're drawn from every faculty across you NSW, which is really quite rare in the field of human rights.

So there's lawyers, this medicine, engineering, science, business, arts and we all work together on issues around human rights. And in particular we look at the intersection of human rights with business, gender, health and climate. And we're really fortunate tonight to have many UNSW staff, students and alumni who work with us here tonight alongside members of the Institute's advisory committee.

And I really am most grateful for your joining because nowadays when you run an event like this, you never know if you going to get one person or 50. So, you know, it's like my own party. And thank you, UNSW for paying for it, Attila. But I you know, I really am enjoying my own wedding here.

I'm going to stay with my husband, so that's good. So thank you. You know, it always is a relief, but really, thank you for and it really is a pertinent topic, I think, which is why we're coming here tonight to talk about accountability. And, you know, sort of as we speak, issues around accountability, democracy and human rights are sort of exploding around the globe.

When we talk about accountability, we talk about it sort of as the cornerstone for human rights. And it has this element of answerability around it. And for those, you know, often we're looking at where accountability is often found wanting with it. After the global pandemic, issues around climate change, ongoing armed conflicts, issues around accountability and human rights are very much at the top of the agenda.

 But beyond that, Australians are really regularly being exposed to corporate and government conduct that is often shaking their belief in accountability. Last month, Roy Morgan released the results of a survey that measured Australian trust in corporate brands, and the 2023 results showed that we have never been more distrustful of corporate brands. And right now. But this distrust is not isolated to business, in particular, the abuse of political power and the erosion of principles of responsible governance have got a lot of attention in the last few years.

The Robodebt scheme. Public appointments, by the former government in particular, that were based on mateship rather than merit. The ongoing approval of fossil fuel projects are often some examples where accountability has been found wanting and what often underlies a breakdown and accountability is a lack of transparency, a failure to consult. And so often begins the slide from accountability to impunity.

At this time, when our institutions and our trust in institutions is declining. The referendum in three days provides an opportunity for Australians to assert that we're a nation shaped by values such as inclusivity, equality and accountability. At the core of the Uluru Statement from the Heart is a call for accountability, symbolic accountability, which enables us to acknowledge our history and the need to respect the harm that has been inflicted upon Aboriginal Australians, but also really practical accountability that calls on First Nations people to consult, inform and shape policies and legislation that impact their lives.

And I'm very proud to work at an institution like UNSW, who is doing a lot of the really hard work behind the referendum, and that as an institution has supported this from the very start. And while those of us who joined us this morning would be a little bit disillusioned around the state of affairs, we've given Natasha the not so easy job of giving us a bit of uplift and hope of how we might be a little bit solution focused around accountability as this stellar panel debates these issues tonight.

Applause

Natasha Mitchell: Thank you Justine, and thank you so much for being here tonight. It's really fantastic to see such a great turnout for what is going to be a solutions focused panel, which I really love because we talk about the problems a lot. Let's focus on the solutions.  I want to let you know that we are recording tonight for Big Ideas on ABC Radio National. You can also find us on the ABC Listen app.

Last year, another very confronting survey landed from the ANU, revealing that only 30% of Australians believe that people in government can be trusted. Only 30%. Over half think that government is run to serve a few big interests. Our elected representatives, 70%, believe that politicians are more interested in looking after themselves. Now isn't that a damning indictment of our representative parliaments in this country and the health of our democracy? So from sports rorts to the profound tragedy of the Robodebt scheme, as mentioned by Justin, of which the Commissioner recently said, Catherine Holmes said truly dismaying was the revelation of dishonesty and collusion to prevent the scheme's lack of legal foundation coming to light.

And then we have in the USA, which might come up today because Trumpism is certainly informing the conversations that we're having publicly here in Australia. We've got Donald Trump running again for president whilst is also facing multiple criminal cases. How is that possible in a healthy democracy? And of course, politicians have always…. Political parties of all persuasions have always been manipulating the truth in various ways, have always been courted by lobbyists, haven't they?

They've always received donations. Have we reached a new and dangerous norm? And I just wanted to offer something that Nick Feik from The Monthly wrote a little while back, which I think really sums up the challenge for this panel today.

“Scandals are nothing new in Australian politics, but the way they have piled up in recent years points to a critical shift in governance. Acts of malfeasance and impropriety have become more than isolated episodes. More than egregious slips or embarrassing failures, unexplained and unresolved. They are open wounds on the body politic, overlapping and now chronic.”

And that's our solution. We're going to heal some wounds and wounds, some heals. Today on the panel. Let me introduce Simon Holmes à Court, a clean tech investor, climate philanthropist, director of the Smart Energy Council, founder of Climate 200, which, of course, was the community crowdfunding initiative that helped fund election campaigns for seven new independents in the last federal election.

We've got Ed Coper here, author of Facts and Other Lies. Welcome to the Disinformation Age. It's a fantastic read. I highly recommend it to you. He's founding executive director of the New York based Centre for Impact Communications, and its involved with all sorts of social change initiatives, advocacy campaigns, political movements and high profile international and local changemakers. I'm sure we'll hear about that.

We also have one of your trailblazing organisers of today's event, Emeritus Professor Andrea Durbach, who served as director of the UNSW Australian Human Rights Centre. Then, now Institute, was executive director of the Public Interest Advocacy Centre, Deputy Human Sex Discrimination Commissioner and was also on the Defence Force Abuse Response Task Force. And as a lawyer in South Africa, she defended victims and opponents of South Africa's apartheid laws. What an enormous career so far.

We have with us Dr. Helen Haines is the independent MP, of course, for Indi, Victoria, my home state, and the brand new National Anti-Corruption Commission, 100 days old this week. I think was very much based on the model that she was pushing forward and worked very hard to develop in concert with others and push forward and hey presto, it worked and it's here and it's running. Let's see what happens next.

Dr. Shireen Morris is a constitutional lawyer, author and director of the Radical Centre. Now, that's Radical Centre Reform Lab, we ascertained just today, at Macquarie University City Law School, she was a senior advisor to Noel Pearson and the Cape York Institute on Indigenous Constitutional Recognition and the Voice to Parliament. Shereen has very much been part of those conversations right from the outset.

Please welcome our panel.

Applause

Many people feel that we've reached a point of no return, that we've lost something fundamental in this conversation about democracy and in the reality of democracy. And so I'm interested in a response from all of you about what gives you hope, what presses you forward with solving the accountability crisis. Andrea.

Andrea Durbach: History. As you mentioned, I grew up in a country where hope was very, very impoverished concept. It's not something that we invested in, but we had to have it in order to survive. And I suppose as a lawyer, I saw the apartheid state, an unlawful state, in my view, that was perpetuating unlawful laws, derive some kind of legitimacy from having this independent judiciary. And it was through that that we as human rights lawyers, sometimes were able to penetrate this edifice of horror that was executed through legislation.

And the hope that came from those moments where we were victorious but often shut down by then a legislature that would change the law to override the decision of the courts. But the hope that we derived was something that took us on to the next level of struggle. So I do have this perhaps naive, old fashioned belief in the role of the judiciary and the role of courts as a third, the third pillar of democracy, really the judiciary.

It is a fundamental pillar, in my view, that is there to hold governments that abuse their power to account. And so I have hope when I see, although I have to say, not this afternoon when I saw the Living Wonders judgment coming out of the Federal Court. But I do think that there are amazing decisions and moments in court history or judicial history that do give us hope and do keep democracy alive.

Natasha Mitchell: We won't go into the living wonders ruling, but just to fill people in in case they don't know.

Andrea Durbach: It was a case brought by some Queensland environmentalists which argued that the government needs to have cognisance of the impacts of fossil fuel mines, coal mine expansion, the impact on plants and places and animals and people. And the Federal Court this afternoon, unfortunately said that there was no obligation on the Government to do that. And I see that they are going to appeal that decision which is somewhat hopeful.

Natasha Mitchell: So the law has gives you hope, but it also has limitations. So we might come to that. Ed Coper, what about you? What gives you hope to press forward, to participate in campaigns, to support those who are driving change with a focus on accountability?

Ed Coper: Well, you have to have hope. And the reason that I do have hope is because the more dire things get and the worse the situation is, time and again, we see when offered the opportunity, people will do something positive about it. So, you know, you mentioned the survey about how little trust we have in politics and how little esteem we have for politicians and how little hope we have and not to steal Helen’s thunder.

But when Australians were given the opportunity to actually flock to a cause that was the opposite of that, they did so in droves. And it was and it was something that was impossible until it was done. And so all of those solutions are within our power. When people head to the polls on Saturday, tens of thousands of people will put on a t shirt and hand out at polling booths for the yes case that have never done anything politically before because they have that hope.

And if enough people share that hope, then then we can actually find the solutions. One of the things I spend a lot of time thinking about is misinformation and disinformation and how you know, how things are polluted online by very strong emotions, which are usually, you know, fear, anger and hate. The only antidote we have for those emotions is hope, because it's the only emotion that we possess that can actually be stronger than those really primal driving forces.So I'm a I'm a big fan of hope.

Natasha Mitchell: Yeah. And there's this concept of hope in action, isn't there, that by acting, that's an embodiment of hope. Helen Haines, what about you? What gives you hope that you can address accountability, and we’ll drill into the Anti-Corruption Commission success that you've had?

Helen Haines: Yeah. Thanks. Thanks, Natasha. Well, seeing hope work. And I think, as I just said, hope and fear are uncomfortable bedfellows. And I think if you give a group of people, a community of people, a pathway to action that harnesses the hope of great leadership, that is a very attractive concept. I've spent most of my life living in rural Australia, in country towns, in small farming communities, and I've seen when people lose hope, when they lose hope that the seasons are not going to deliver what they need to grow their crops when they see people leave the community because there's no longer something there for them.

So when I see a community actually grasp the nettle and say there is a pathway out of this and that, that's something that really inspires me. And coming from the electorate of Indi, where we had lost hope in our representation but decided we weren't going to lay down and accept that. And then when a bunch of bushies like ours were able to change the political dynamic in a regional electorate such as India, I mean, nothing succeeds like success when it comes to hope.

And I think that what we were able to show in 2013 when Cathy McGowan was elected as the first independent member for Indi, inspired people like myself and a whole lot of other people to get involved with their democracy, to find that there is a place where good people with strong values can safely and respectfully engage in a debate and engage in ideas and see them through.

So I remain inspired by that. When I think about those corruption indexes and the lack of trust. And I know that when trust is low, that we then do not grasp the ideas that we need to bring us to change in places that we need to change, like in climate action, like in a voice to Parliament, that's a dangerous thing.

So for me, that whole piece of work that I was able to do in the last Parliament and then see through in this Parliament, I think gave a lot of people hope.

Natasha Mitchell: There’s something profoundly disempowering about a lack of trust though, isn't there?

Helen Haines: Yeah, there is, but I think the lack of trust comes from that sense of impunity that that folks could get away with things in high places and never pay the price. And I think now it's not going to be the salve for all wounds, but it's something concrete. We have a national anti-corruption commission. It does include contractors to the Commonwealth and by golly, I had to work hard to get that included. But when we think about the lack of trust now in in corporate, in corporate Australia or in corporations, even that piece in our National Anti-Corruption Commission legislation is fundamental to restoring trust in corporate.

Natasha Mitchell: Well, if you've seen the scandals around the lack of transparency of consultancy arrangements with government, etc, it seems absolutely fundamental to a functioning commission.

Helen Haines: Absolutely fundamental. And a parliamentarian who sits a few rows away from me in the Parliament, who has had a fair bit to say to me over the years about why we didn't need a national anti-corruption commission.

I was recently passing that person in the corridor and it was a little interchange of ideas, let's say, and I just said, ‘I've only got three letters this time. PWC’.

Natasha Mitchell: To be a fly on the wall in Parliament House sometimes. Shireen Morris, what about you? You know this, obviously for the listening audience, for the audience in the room, this is before the referendum, but after Saturday this will go to air. But what you've been right at the heart of that conversation around the Voice referendum. What gives you hope about our ability to address the lack of accountability in government?

Shireen Morris: Well, I suppose that's, you know, love for Australia, right? In so many ways. We're such a great democracy in the in the global sense. We're doing well overall, democratically speaking, but in some aspects we are failing miserably. And I guess, as you know, growing up, the daughter of Indian and Fijian Indian migrants came and I've just had access to so much prosperity and opportunity compared to what my parents had. And I guess when I was growing up, you know, my mum used to say to me, ‘It's not fair the way Aboriginal people have been treated in this country, is it?’

And then by the time I was studying law at Monash, I started to learn the nuts and bolts truth of that history. And it's so unfair the way successive governments have treated Indigenous people and it's so unfair that they remain the most disadvantaged sector of our population that have had nothing like the opportunities me and my family have had access to since my parents came here in the 70s.

So I've worked with Indigenous leaders like Noel Pearson for the last 12 years now, and I suppose the thing that keeps me going is I was really inspired by the ability of people to change their minds on this journey and to find common ground, and that the experience of reaching across political ideological and cultural divides to people who had completely different world views to me, completely different politics to me.

I'm thinking of constitutional conservatives like Julian Leeser, who Noel Pearson and I spoke to way back in 2014 about this germinating idea that indigenous people had been calling for over 100 years that we kind of articulated in its first constitutional iteration. And, you know, he was someone that I thought, ‘Well, we're never going to agree on anything.

You know, he thinks you don't need to change anything in his beloved Constitution’. And he was so paranoid about the high court. And but you know what? Conversation after conversation, human being, too human being, sitting down talking about the history, finding common ground on the history. And we met in the middle. And look what's happened so many years later.

He has resigned from the shadow cabinet because he still supports the idea that indigenous people deserve recognition.

Natasha Mitchell: He's vacillated along the way though, hasn’t he? It’s that pull of party politics, pulled him back into the fray.

Shireen Morris: And I see that happen a lot. I've seen the power of when you sit down and have a conversation with an open heart and an open mind, people do change their minds and consensus can be built.

And I suppose it always felt like there was a big breakthrough around the corner and it has been very inspiring to see consensus grow along the way. And I think what Indigenous people did with the Uluru Statement from the Heart was just so profoundly inspiring after everything they've been through in this country, you know, reaching out the hand of friendship and love and compassion to the rest of us and asking for something that is so modest in the grand scheme of things, something so modest, an advisory voice in their affairs.

So I suppose that's what gives me hope is is seeing how these conversations can be had.

Natasha Mitchell: Relationship building,

Shireen Morris: That's it

Natasha Mitchell: Relationship building and letting a few things shed that we hold on tightly to. It seems to be key, doesn't it?

Simon Holmes à Court, what gives you hope? In some ways we should be ending with hope, but I wanted to start with hope to really set the tone of this conversation as a solution focused conversation, Simon?

Simon Holmes à Court: I was so privileged to be in the public gallery in Parliament House on the 12th of February 2019, when the cross-bench Independents, the Independents and Greens in the Lower House voted, voted through the amendments that put in the Medivac arrangements for offshore detention. It was a historic moment. It was the first time the Government had lost an amendment on their own bill in 90 years in the House.

And it happened because for a brief moment we had the balance of power vested in the crossbench and I saw how they worked with the crossbench in the Senate, brought the amendment down, pushed it through against the Government's wishes. But in that moment, a large group of detainees in offshore detention received access to medical attention that had previously been withdrawn from them.

That gave me hope that our Parliament can achieve great things and it gave me hope. When Cathy McGowan signalled to her community in India that that she was to terms where it was enough for her, and that community selected Helen to run for them. And and clearly, you know, evidently Helen won and, and showed that this wasn't just about one person or a personality in Cathy McGowan, though a big personality she is, this was a community effort and at the same in that same election, the Warringah chose to move away from the former prime minister Tony Abbott, and elected Zali Steggall.

That gave me hope when the community in both of those communities demonstrated a faith that the system could work, work for them. Throughout that Parliament, Helen pushed the National Integrity Commission in a time when neither major party wanted to talk about integrity and most Australians didn't know that we didn't have accountability of  those systems. Zali Steggall kept climate in the in the news cycle, kept it in the parliamentary.. kept  discussion of it in the chamber the whole way through that term.

That gave me hope. But it was in the lead up to the last election that I first started thinking about. The word hope hit me in the face when one day on a on a it was a call with the group from Mackellar who had this crazy idea that they wanted to they wanted to follow the Indi, Warringah model.

And one of the volunteers said to me that she was in it, she was doing it because for her it was active hope. And I never heard that phrase before. She said, ‘Yeah, I can sit at home and I can complain about Scott Morrison or I can, you know, throw my shoe at the TV whenever anyone from Sky News comes on…

Natasha Mitchell: It’s a form of active hope.

Simon Holmes à Court: Or I can complain about Rupert Murdoch, whatever. But getting out there, engaging with my community, finding people who who are like minded and finding our own representative that is active hope, that gives me hope. And you know what? They were successful there as  were 11 communities around the country last May. So I think a lot about that active hope. Hope that's not active is seems foolish but hope that's active is uplifting and keeps me going.

Natasha Mitchell: Active hope keeps it moving forward, too, I think in some ways it. Ed Coper your book describes the rise of what you call the political weaponisation of organised lying. Isn't that a huge isn't that huge? The political weaponisation of organised lying and the dramatic way in which the rise of social media and the decline of mainstream media has really exacerbated and amplified those lies.

And the other thing that interested me about your book is that you say, actually, in fact, all the traditional ways that we have of challenging lies, whether they are from a political source or otherwise, well, we're actually doing it all wrong. You know, things like correcting the record, fact checking, myth busting, they fundamentally don't work. Why?

Ed Coper: Well, the very simple reason that our brains don't really care if something is true or not.

We like to think we're a lot more rational than we are. And you know, this room here is full of very intelligent people and listening on the ABC is ABC listeners, very intelligent people. That's not a sort of feature in this all human beings. In fact, some studies have shown the more educated you are, the more susceptible you are to actually not change your mind when faced with incontrovertible evidence, because that's not what's important to us.

What's important to us are social factors; fitting in with what our peers think, belonging to groups, not being an outsider, being an insider, and so on social media, those are platforms that are designed to replicate exactly what our brain likes. We form groups. We can see, we quantified what our peers think because there's a like button, you actually count the number of people who like a statement online.

This is manna from heaven for the way our brains like to make up opinions. And nothing has to do whether something is true or false. So I don't have to explain this to anyone in Australia at the moment because we are swimming in organised, politically weaponised lies at the moment. And I think that this has been a really important experience for a lot of people in Australia to realise the impact of what happens when lies are organised really effectively and spread using these platforms, that we're really designed to spread to, you know, sell us sneakers and other items. But they actually turn out to be very, very effective weapons in organising us against ourselves.

Natasha Mitchell: I mean, they're dangerous for democracy, they're dangerous for fact-based policy discussions. This is really at the heart of the accountability crisis, isn't it?

Ed Coper: Absolutely. And the solutions to it, really our trust in institutions to get us through. What happened in the pandemic? We thought that trust in institutions was still there and that people would listen to public health advice. But that was just an assumption that had been eroded over time. And it wasn't until we faced a crisis like the pandemic where we really saw it laid bare that people wouldn't trust institutions, they wouldn't follow public health advice.

Natasha Mitchell: But they trusted their Facebook feed.

Ed Coper: Exactly because that was coming from their peers, or at least manufactured to feel like it comes from your peers. When you know the pre-internet age, if I had an opinion that was contrary into the mainstream, So if I was an anti-vaxxer on measles and everyone else in my street was very pro-vaccine, the incentive for me is to modify my beliefs to fit in with the crowd there.

But online I can just go and find people who share my opinion. It doesn't matter what the person next to me thinks, doesn't matter what my physical community thinks. I can get pushed into a little bubble that's completely divorced from reality, and we've seen that happen in the US very famously, where half the country still thinks that Donald Trump is president. Apologies, I knew we would get to Trump eventually.

Natasha Mitchell: Is that true? Do they really? No they don’t.

Ed Coper: Half of all Republicans think that he won the 2020 election and they have simply, rather than being brought back to the centre through mainstream consensus and a moderating force of a media and social factors that would, you know, bring them around…
Natasha Mitchell: The election was robbed from him.

Ed Coper: …they continue to live in that in that unreality.

Natasha Mitchell: So let's come back to solutions then. So if all those traditional anchor points, trustworthy institutions, trust in government, trust in science, trust in mainstream media and what they might report to us, what will work? What do you think will work to bring us back to some sort of sense of a shared understanding of what's real and what's not? Of what's truth and what's not? Of what's a political lie and what's a political truth?

Ed Coper: It's a very question that, you know, not to put some hyperbole on it, but the fate of our society, you know, really rests on our ability to do that, because, you know, it's not just about whether Trump won an election. It's not just about whether the Voice is actually a UN conspiracy or, you know, we'll divide the nation on race.

It's actually a whole information ecosystem that will pollute our ability to achieve any policy reform or any action or any social cohesion on any issues. So I just want to I don't want to understate the problem there. Now, the active hope, I guess it comes that that the more people are aware of this and wake up to - they have actually been able to show you can inoculate people against misinformation online - and it's by having these conversations where you explain what's happening you teach digital literacy and digital citizenship to people so that they know in the same way that you can you know, you can give civics education about how our Constitution works - although I think people would probably agree the referendum shown, we haven't done a good job of that either - you can also teach about how harmful this is to our society from a public health of view, you can tell a story that informs people about how to interact online, what to watch out for, so that they recognise the signs when they see it.

They actually are pretty good at calling out misinformation rather than just, you know, accepting it wholesale when they say it. So there are solutions. We've just got to evolve this conversation, recognise the scale of the problem and, you know, treat it like the public health crisis that it is.

Natasha Mitchell: So starting young really is what it sounds like.

Ed Coper: Absolutely. I mean, you know, think about someone who is in high school at the moment. Their baby photos are probably still on Facebook. So their entire lives have been public on social media and they don't watch TV. They watch TikTok that substituted TV and a lot of young people's minds. And what's the curriculum that's taught them how to inhabit this world where they have access to unlimited, unhealthy and harmful information and no filter for objective fact and bias that that mainstream media usually follows?

Natasha Mitchell: Simon Holmes à Court, there's an interesting line in your book reflecting on the campaign of the Teal Independents from Harvard legal scholar Lawrence Lessig. And he says ‘Fixing democracy requires us to strike at the root. Everything else is just hacking at the branches.’ So I want to hear from you about why you thought that electoral reform and focusing on the elections and campaigns was striking at the root.

Simon Holmes à Court: I was very privileged to have lunch with Dr. Lessig about two weeks ago in Boston. They say never meet your heroes, but he absolutely met my expectations. A massive, massive brain. He I saw him give a talk where he said ‘You might be interested in human rights. You might be interested in climate change, you might be interested in indigenous issues. Maybe you're into education, but all of us will have experienced that. We know what needs to get done. The evidence base is out there to fix the problems, but we're just not making progress because our political system is not working for us, because our political system is polarised or captured. We don't get the solutions that we know are achievable when our democracy doesn't work.’

So he puts it to everyone that while you all have your primary issue, the first issue we need to solve is a functioning democracy. So until we have our democracy working for us, we're not going to make progress on these wider issues. So could we all just come together just for a while, fix our… keep doing what you're doing, but striking at the root of why we're not making the progress that we think we should make is our number one, or our first priority.

Natasha Mitchell: So why did that galvanise you to take action in the way that you did, which was look for lots of money to fund candidates that you thought would support your cause of climate change awareness and action?

Simon Holmes à Court: Yeah, sorry. Sometimes this movement looks like it's an overnight success, but it started 11 years ago in Indi. I wasn't there at the beginning of it. I wasn't there for so many of the key moments of the genesis of  the movement. And every one of the.. we supported 23 campaigns. We didn't support candidates. We supported communities that had gone out there, decided they wanted to run a candidate, found their own candidate, built their own organisations and then come to us.

But we recognise that if you hear that the political machines have had 100 years plus to work out how to campaign, communities have got so much going for them, but are often outgunned by the parties that don't have, you know, they don't know how to set up their Facebook account for political advertising. They don't know how to comply with the Australian Electoral Commission guidelines, whatever.

So we knew that they needed like a helpdesk support meeting with organisations that can help them scale up. They needed funding support. We didn't provide all the funding by any means. We provided about 35% of the funding for most campaigns, but by giving people confidence and knowledge and then bringing together this community of 11,200 donors, we were able to level the playing field just enough that people had a chance, or communities had a chance, for their candidate to get up.

Natasha Mitchell: You've said that cash for access is a corruption of our democracy, and some people have criticised you for bankrolling these campaigns. And so how did you, in a sense, protect those campaigns from this idea that if you've got enough money, you can get your agenda in the corridors of power?

Simon Holmes à Court: Yeah, there's a few I mean, a few basic rules. We early on, we thought we should put up a Charter of Independence with the campaigns that we support. We should say we,you know, ‘We won't tell you what to you do. You don't tell us what to do’ and boring stuff, like if there's leftover
money at the end of the campaign how it's dealt with.

Natasha Mitchell: They didn't like that, though did they?

Simon Holmes à Court: No. So, we had this idea that you'd put up a, what does it mean to be a high integrity, you know, an independent and turn it into a letter that we would co-sign. And the feedback we got from some of the candidates was ‘Absolutely no way we signing anything that looks like a contract. It's  arm's length or it's nothing’.

And I really I really like that. That's why I was at an electric vehicle conference about three months after the election, and I bumped into one of the Independents who had won, and she asked me a question about electric vehicle policy. And I said, ‘Well, we've never had a discussion on policy, and if I answer your question, will be crossing the Rubicon’. So we both agreed, let's not talk about policy, and that's a hard and fast rule.

Natasha Mitchell: So what will keep your.. what will keep the Independents accountable to their original mission, which was integrity in government? I mean, once you enter the corridors of power, you kind of you become, particularly if you're an Independent, I'll come to you, Helen, on this, but you're a dealmaker and a deal breaker.

It's a complex environment within which to realise what you imagine you might be able to realise. So how will they maintain integrity as their focus?

Simon Holmes à Court: Can I just give one little….?

Natasha Mitchell: Yes.

Simon Holmes à Court: I'm about to say that I'm not the one to answer this properly, but the way the way that we see it is that there's a hierarchy that your average party MP has that most of them have a view that they will be a Minister or even Prime Minister one day.

And so their career, their personal aspiration is number one, their faction is number two, they're their party, their donors, their branch. And about number six, if there's any energy at the end of the day, maybe constituents get a little look in. For the community Independent, there is nothing between the MP and the community. They're not responsible to us…

Natasha Mitchell: In theory.

Simon Holmes à Court: If they let their community down, they won't get re-elected.
Natasha Mitchell: Helen Haines, Indi MP – what’s your thought about that?

Helen Haines: Yeah, well, Deal maker, deal breaker, but you can't be a heartbreaker.

Natasha Mitchell: You’ve said that before.

Helen Haines: I haven't. Actually. It was just a flash of brilliance. No, seriously, I think. I think it is a contract of the heart with your community when you are an Independent.

I know that might sound gushy. Might sound a bit naff. Might sound romantic. But hope is romantic, actually. And the idea, again, from a rural communities such as ours that that we could do the whole take on take on the dragon of big party politics. And before I said a pack of bushies, and I meant that in a way that people in rural and regional Australia tend to be rather modest about their abilities.

But, think about where the greatest innovation in in Australia has come from in our I guess in our colonial history, when we think about some of the agricultural innovation, for example, it's come from the regions because we had a problem to solve and we had a problem to solve in Indi and we knew that no one else would solve it for us.

So we had to make a contract with each other that if integrity was at the core of what we were trying to do, then anyone who was elected as part of our community into the federal Parliament had a compact with the people to maintain that integrity. And I guess the kind of worked example of that is, is for me every time a piece of legislation comes across my desk, and there's about to be a big stack come across on Friday this week, we don't get much notice actually of what we've been debating in the following week is

Natasha Mitchell: You've got a fun weekend head.

Helen Haines: Yeah, I know. I got a bit of polling booth work to do in between, but what I promised to the people in Indi was every time on key legislation, is that I would do everything I could to understand what the problem was we were trying to solve. I would do the research and I've been nicely trained by the University of New South Wales many years ago, that I would seek that information to understand the problem.

Fundamentally, I would seek to understand what the legislation that was attempting to do in relation to solving that problem. And I would commit to speaking to the Minister, to the shadow minister, to civil society, to people in my electorate. I would try to get their view. Next I would ask a fundamental question, is this ethical? Is this good governance something, you know, something Medivac like that was just a no brainer.

This is not ethical. You wouldn't even need to go to the library on that one. What does it mean to the people of Indi? What does it mean to rural and regional Australia? Because fundamentally for me, a key driver of why I'm in the Parliament is, I so believe in rural Australia, and I so believe in wanting to see a thriving rural Australia. What does it mean to the nation? And then when I report back to my community, I report back through that matrix.

Natasha Mitchell: Interesting to hear that. So let's come to the National Anti-Corruption Commission. Legislated. A hundred days old.

Helen Haines: A thousand referrals and counting.

Natasha Mitchell: A thousand referrals. Is it right that it was 100 in a day or something like that?

Helen Haines: Yeah, it's pretty big.

Natasha Mitchell: Extraordinary. So I mean, too often when political scandals have broken, one of the issues in this, at the heart of this conversation, is that they break they occupy the news headlines for a while and then they disappear and there are no consequences. So will there be consequence with this commission?

Helen Haines: Yes, there will Natasha

Natasha Mitchell: What sorts of consequences?

Helen Haines: Well, I think the first thing I want to say is that for a lot of people, a lot of people would love the ‘popcorn moment’. You know, I would love the kind of thrill of the ‘popcorn moment’ of watching this unfold. And we're not going to get as many popcorn moments as perhaps the Australian public would like.

One of the things that I certainly argued strongly for was that we would have many more public hearings. I didn't win that argument in the Parliament, but we will have some public hearings when the commissioner and the Commission determines that it is strongly in the public interest to do so. But what we will have now is, is a consequence of a finding, a finding of corruption is very, very serious. That would be for anybody in public life the most serious of consequences.

I think so. I don't think you can underestimate that. And of course, the other key component of this and you know, I'm nervous talking to such a big brimful of lawyers, I imagine, is understanding where the commission begins and where the commission ends. And if indeed a referral is pointing to something that looks like it's a criminal offense and that that does not sit with the National Anti-Corruption Commission in its referral.

Natasha Mitchell: So, for example, will it will it address pork barrelling and the kind of, you know, preferential funding of people's electorates for sporting facilities?

Helen Haines: Indeed. And I happen to be in electorate where all of that unfolded actually. But look, the Attorney-General assures me so. But I'm not convinced that it will do enough.

I'll continue to pursue better practice from our ministers, from our governments when it comes to accountability on the spending of taxpayers money. And this notion of maladministration, which may be difficult to show, is systemic and serious corruption, that's not okay. You know, it is not okay, I believe, to design the infrastructure of Australia our roads, our airports, our hospitals, our schools, our bridges, whatever it might be.

It's not okay to design those on the basis of a marginal electorate. It's just not okay. It's not okay to design our telecommunications infrastructure, whether it be mobile phone blackspot towers or whether it be community energy, community batteries. It's not okay to make a promise in my mind during an election campaign to a community and say,’ If we win, we're going to give you one of those’ and then have a grant round that is completely constructed in such a way that those communities get them.

Natasha Mitchell: And a lack of transparency.

Helen Haines: Absolutely not ok.

Natasha Mitchell: And it won't stop politicians telling porkies. It might address pork barrelling. It's not going to stop them - I think bald-faced lies is at the heart of the Australian politic at the moment.

Helen Haines: Yeah. Yes it is. And again, I think it is the job of strong courageous - I'm aligned actually parliamentarians. It's why it's so totally brilliant. Do not underestimate the power of a big and growing crossbench to call this out both sides of the aisle because that's what we can do. And, and I think that we need better, we do need better laws when it does come to pork barrelling. And I'm not satisfied yet that the National Anti-Corruption Commission is the place to fix that.

Natasha Mitchell: Will it protect whistleblowers? Because that seems to be… We’ll keep this short because I want to come to, Shireen. But that's at the heart of the success of this, isn't it?

Helen Haines: It totally is Natasha.

Natasha Mitchell: That public servants as whistleblowers, politicians as whistleblowers, members of the public, members of corporations are protected if they whistleblow.

Helen Haines: Yeah, fundamentally we need to improve the Public Interest Disclosure Act, the PID Act. There's been some small changes to that, but we need to have fundamental reform. The Attorney-General is promising us that. I've been calling him out on this one, that we should have had a discussion paper long before now to get moving on improvements to the Public Interest Disclosure Act, in line with the Moss Review. Plenty of people nodding. Probably the only room in Australia that would know what that is.

Natasha Mitchell: So describe what it is briefly so people understand.

Helen Haines: Well, if this was a review undertaken about our public interest disclosure about whistleblowing many years ago, a previous government promised to do work on it, never did it. Now we have a National Anti-Corruption Commission. Contingent upon that being successful is that people in public life, people in in our social services department, can blow the whistle on something like Robodebt people are - before the courts right now - we know that Richard Boyle is before the courts right now, having done the right thing on whistleblowing. And in fact, he has a strong chance of going to prison long before anyone in the tax department who was responsible for wrongdoing will go to go to jail. So that's not okay. We must fix whistleblower laws. We must do it urgently. And I will not be quiet about that until they are done.

Applause

Natasha Mitchell: So there's been sixty millennia of conversations on this country, Gadigal country about accountability. This isn't the first. We're not reinventing this. We're not inventing this conversation, are we? People have had conversations about being accountable to each other, to their communities, to their tribes, to their language groups, to their cultures.

This is a rich conversation that's had many, many, many, many millennia before us and in a way, accountability in government, Shireen Morris is about listening, isn't it? And so to what extent for you is the Voice referendum about government accountability?

Shireen Morris: I think it's completely about that. You know, it's a way of enhancing and increasing accountability through the political process, you know, rather than a courts orientated, litigious route for accountability. Increased accountability in Indigenous Affairs under the Constitution. This this is a way of increasing accountability through the political process by giving Indigenous communities a greater voice, a transparent voice and a voice that will be heard by all of us when Parliament and government make laws and policies about them. And it's all about increasing the accountability and the transparency of those decisions that are made.

And the way I often describe it, when talking about it is, you know, historically it's been this top down power relationship set up by the Constitution. And the Uluru Statement talks about that torment of powerlessness that Indigenous people have suffered under the Constitution in this country, which has enabled all those unfair laws and policies of the past that were created in this top down way without enough accountability laws, denying them the vote, denying the payment of equal wages, splitting families apart, banning their languages from being spoken, you know, up until the late seventies in some areas later.

But even today, you read what the Productivity Commission wrote about Australia's efforts at Closing the Gap. The fundamental thing that they pinpointed why is Australia failing to close the gap now, even when, you know, policymakers are supposedly good intentioned and even now when money is spent trying to address disadvantage, why is that failing? The Productivity Commission said because everything is top down, there's not enough listening and there's not enough accountability.

The good intentions and the money spent, bureaucrats and politicians, they simply don't know how to truly listen, truly partner with Indigenous communities when making laws and policies intended to benefit them.

Natasha Mitchell: Is this only about accountability to First Nations people, or is it, do you think there's a deeper flow on effect here about the accountability of government generally to its constituency?

Shireen Morris: If a Voice gets in the Constitution, if we vote yes on Saturday and this happens, I think the accountability, enhanced accountability will happen on a few levels. One is, as you say, that, yes, there'll be increased accountability to the Indigenous communities who the bureaucrats and politicians are supposed to be working for when they make Closing the Gap policies or whatever else it is.

But because the advice will be transparent, you know, the advice to the parliament will be published and that means the media can report on it and that means we will know. Yes. So there is enhanced accountability to the people as well. And that's

Natasha Mitchell: The one community of people. And I guess that's the that's the concern that some people have about the Voice referendum…

Shireen Morris: Sorry, I mean, to all of us.

Natasha Mitchell: Right.

Shireen Morris: Because of the visibility of that dialogue. It will be visible dialogue where the Voice will give public advice. And if the government rejects that advice, then we'll know. We'll see that and we'll be asking questions, hopefully. Right. So there's increased accountability on different levels, which I think will be very productive and will lead to better decision making, better bang for buck, and eventually over time improved practical outcomes, which is the whole point.

Natasha Mitchell: Well, Ed Coper was talking earlier about disinformation and the political weaponisation of disinformation. And this referendum campaign has been flooded with misinformation and disinformation. So much misunderstanding and people.. and different parties have leveraged off misinformation, disinformation. How have you worked to address that? Because that's a question of an accountability, too, isn't it, when politicians peddle the wrong information, incorrect information.

Shireen Morris: It's been absolutely appalling. It's been disgusting, the lies that have been told about this incredibly modest and pragmatic proposal simply for a constitutionally guaranteed advisory body. Non-binding advice. Whereby the body is pretty much fully controlled by Parliament and can be evolved by Parliament. So the modesty of this proposal, given what you know, Indigenous people have been through in this country, they've come to us with this incredibly generous and modest proposal and the laws that have been told about it.

You know, Peta Credlin on Sky said if the Lindt terrorist had been Aboriginal, the Voice, you know, the police would have to call up the Voice first before saving those terror victims. That's one example. People in migrant communities are being told that if you vote yes to this, an Aboriginal person can come and take your land or your house.

Your kids scholarship might get given to an Aboriginal person. If you run a business, you'll have to give free stuff to the Aboriginal people.

Natasha Mitchell: So Ed Coper would say you're in the process of amplifying that misinformation. On national radio.

Shireen Morris: And I did have in the back of my mind that this will be broadcast after the referendum,  but it’s important to call it out.

Natasha Mitchell: So how have your responded because I think this process of the referendum and the challenge of addressing misinformation in real time like this,  and disinformation, so that peddled by government as well, is a is a really active challenge is the challenge of our times. It's the challenge of accountability.

Shireen Morris: So, I mean, you know, I've been telling people that if you've been told this, it's not true. It's a total lie. You know, I've been trying to do little videos. You try and do it any opportunity you can.

Natasha Mitchell: Are you on Tik Tok? Yeah.

Shireen Morris: In the last week or two, I have put myself on TikTok

Natasha Mitchell:You've got that desperate.

Shireen Morris: That's right. But  that's where the conversations are happening right? If we don't tell people, they'll just think it's true. Some people, not all, some you know, some people are getting freaked out by these utter lies. And it's as you say, it's a concerted campaign. And I think it's true that we're only learning how to counter it.

But everyone here’s got to do what they can, you know, and be aware of it. And there's still a few days left. And please don't assume that your family member or your neighbour or your colleague has the correct information because they may not you know, we in this room are in a pretty informed bubble, I would think, where we think that, you know, people are making informed decisions and we're lawyers, but everyone here has got some really great skills and it's not too late to be out there, actively refuting the misinformation, talking to your neighbours, talking to your elderly mother or whoever.

And I've certainly had friends who have said you said to me when I've urged them, ‘Come on’, a Chinese friend of mine, elderly, non-English speaking mother said, ‘Make sure you talk to your parents’. It literally took him 2 minutes. The mother had heard nothing about the referendum, had heard a little bit on WeChat that this might mean our land is up for grabs, you know, and he had a two minute conversation with her, said, ‘No, no, they just want to be heard.

They want to be consulted in decisions made about them’. One minute and she started getting fired up on behalf of indigenous people and saying, ‘Yeah, they should be heard and give me that postal paper and I'm going to write Yes. And can you post this for me?’ So have the conversations and it's not too late. And this is our one opportunity to stand with Indigenous people who need our support right now, and we're not going to get this opportunity again.

Natasha Mitchell: I reckon Ed Coper has something to say, but I want to come to Andrea Cobach because you created this panel and you can say it's taken me this long to get back to you. You know, you put together some mighty big thinkers. How are you listening to this conversation?

Andrea Durbach: I'm listening to something that really gets my goat and that is going back to the point that you make about accountability, that that's something that I think our Prime Minister has really failed us on, is he has said he will not, that reparations for the stolen generations and for indigenous people in this country is not on the table. And I think reparations is one of the greatest acts of accountability.

Natasha Mitchell: So tell us about that and what you mean by reparations, because you've been involved in a number of very interesting processes, and one of them was the sexual abuse task force within the military. And there was a process that you were involved in driving that was really quite crucial. What can we learn from that?

Andrea Durbach: Well, I wanted to stay with the Stolen Generations and Reparations, because I think what was missing from Kevin Rudd's apology in 2008 was substance. There was said gesture. There was that symbolic gesture, but it got suspended at the level of political symbolism because there was nothing to meet it substantially, i.e. reparations.

He never followed through on what needed to be done, which was you can apologise and you know, the law on reparations says, there's apology, there's compensation, there's restitution of land and language. There's rehabilitation emotionally, physically, from the harm tht’s been suffered. You have to, that's the justice, that's the accountability. The apology is just simply an important acknowledgment of the harm.

But then you have to meet that harm with the substance. And the substance is reparations. And I think Albanese has failed us and the Indigenous community by saying they're not on the table because, if God help us, this referendum doesn't get through. He's made that call and I think reparations has to be a follow on of a No vote.

Natasha Mitchell: So what would that look like?

Andrea Durbach: It would look like giving people the land back, their language back, putting in proper counselling services for enduring harm. What we hear the gap that's being talked about and the policy commission gap is in, it's shaped this failure to meet Indigenous people in relation to education, health, housing, health needs. It's shaped by that experience of trauma, of being removed from family.

It's an enduring trauma. We have not grappled with that. And I just see the debate around the Voice simply reinforcing that trauma. It's pulling people into despair once again. And so what it will look like is, and the Voice will be an enormous help in that regard, because it will be taking information from people who are the beneficiaries of these pieces of legislation or policy.

It'll be hearing them about what their actual needs are. And, you know, we've got incredible examples of that trampling on need, whether it's cultural heritage, you know, Rio Tinto does Acknowledgment to Country, all sorts of good things and then it blows up, you Juukan Gorge and that's sending a very, very distorted message to what we are doing as a nation to repair and be accountable to our Indigenous people.

Natasha Mitchell: So your work has been very much defined by looking at how the State can be held to account for its involvement in human rights abuses from apartheid onwards. And so where have you seen governments being held to account successfully through reparation? What process have you seen that you think can give us hope?

Andrea Durbach: Well, there's a very interesting case that's recently been settled, which many of you probably aware of that the Indonesian smugglers, these young Indonesian kids really who through desperation became people smugglers.

The… they were prosecuted, many of them detained. And the government is now there's a settlement arising out of this decision, $127 million being paid in compensation to these people who were wrongly convicted and wrongly detained because the Federal Police used an x-ray technique which was desperately flawed to determine their age. So many of them were then catapulted through this flawed technique into an age where they could be prosecuted.

So that's reparation to my mind, that the government is now having to compensate these people who were wrongly detained, wrongly prosecuted. It's terrible. It happened ten, more than ten years ago under the Gillard Government's reign. So that's a very important, I think, illustration of reparation in that redress sense. You know, kids in Victoria a couple of years ago moved from a juvenile facility, mostly Indigenous kids, into an adult facility where they were exposed to the most terrible torment and cruel and inhuman torture.

Victorians Supreme Court came down in favour of saying to the Government, the Victorian Government, ‘These kids, you cannot put children in adult facilities. They're getting damaged and harmed’. So there was some sort of reparation because the law will be changed, the policies will be changed and these kids will no longer be subjected to that sort of treatment.

Natasha Mitchell: There's often a sense that somehow, yes, politicians are involved in enabling legislation through their work. That's what they're there to do, isn't it? But there's a sense that they're somehow outside of the law if they misbehave, if they're corrupt, if they lie. And so, what role do you see for the law in holding the political elite to account?

Andrea Durbach: Well, thanks to Helen Haines, we've now got your integrity commission. That's going to be a big help. But it's very rare that I think you see politicians actually be held to account. We have a culture of apology and move on. Or you deny you reject and deny that culture of absolute rejection. ‘I reject. I deny’. We had an Attorney-General accused of sexual assault who did exactly that, and he rode it out, the highest law officer in the land, and he rode it out, and he still remained in government.

It's astonishing me that that could happen. So it's very, very rare. I mean the Eddie Obeid's the Ian MacDonald's, even judge Justice Marcus Einfeld over a traffic fine, a parking ticket. It's very rare that that misconduct is found. Our former premier Berejiklian. And what think is more important though, is that the policies of the people, like of the governments who make these decisions actually harm people like the Robodebt example.

It's not simply the individuals in government that needs to be held to account. It's the whole of departments of government and it's the policy advisers. If those policies are then investigated and excavated and the harm is then seen, as has been apparent with Robodebt, then I think if you hold government to account and they're forced to pay huge penalties, that's a very important deterrent.

Natasha Mitchell: Should it always.. It seems to always require a royal commission. Should it always require a royal commission to hold government to account in this way?

Andrea Durbach: Well, if you act on the Royal Commission's recommendations? Yes.

Natasha Mitchell: And do they always get acted on? No. No.

Natasha Mitchell: Robodebt is a 1000 page report at least. And one wonders whether it will all be acted on, whether the you know. We're entering an era where artificial intelligence is going to be used in all sorts of contexts already is, to make decisions about, people's lives.

It's only going to get worse. Robodebt is just a sign of things to come, I suspect.

Andrea Durbach: Yeah, I agree with that. But we had a session this morning at the conference where we spoke about the endless commissions of inquiry or Royal commissions, the Stolen Generations inquiry, all these reports that are simply shelved and not properly implemented. Kate Jenkins report on sexual harassment and sexual assault in Parliament only now is being implemented, some those recommendations. So there has to be political will. It's all very well to have the exposure, but then you need to have the closure as well. It means the execution of what the findings are and to make a difference to people's lives.

Natasha Mitchell: Let's mix it up a bit and open to the floor now for questions. We've got roving mics. Yes, the hands go straight up. I love that.

Audience 1: I'm looking for a practical solution. I'm standing outside a pre-polling booth. Here comes an undecided voter and the guy next to me says, ‘Did you know that the government spent $26 billion of your money on Indigenous communities? And their leaders..’ - gestures to Mundine and Price – ‘…think it was a complete waste of money.’

What's my one sentence reply?

Natasha Mitchell: Shireen Morris.

Shireen Morris: I always I mean, look, the Productivity Commission said money is not being well spent to deliver good outcomes because policymakers and bureaucrats don't listen properly to Indigenous communities. This all about a commitment to listening to communities, and I imagine communities would be saying government, ‘This program doesn't work, scrap that. This is duplicated and wasteful, fix that up. This program is better.’

So I think it will actually deliver better bang for buck if policies and programs are developed and implemented with the communities they're meant to be helping.

Natasha Mitchell: Ed Coper.

Ed Coper: Yeah, look, I you know, I don't want to give anyone in the room marriage advice, but this is something that I learned in my marriage - as my wife's not here, so I can say it. The arguments never actually about the argument. And the same is true when we talk about forming political opinions as well. So quite often when we hear something that's quite outlandish and wrong, we go to the, you know, extreme correction. But what is that person expressing when they have one of these extreme opinions? Quite often there's an underlying anxiety or grievance or something, and it might be something that we can find something in common with.

If someone is expressing that specific opinion about the Voice and public spending is are they are they hurting in the cost of living crisis themselves? Are they concerned about, you know, government profligacy because they have eroded trust in government for exactly the same reasons that we all roundly agreed with earlier in this panel. But we tend to go to the points of disagreement rather than trying to think about, well, what are they really upset about here? What are they…  What's the point of connection that I could find with someone? If some, you know, someone in the pandemic came up to me and, you know, started spouting anti-vaccine anti-lockdown things, the best thing to do is to say, ‘I care about the health of my kids, too. That's why I get them vaccinated. You know, you might come to an opposite opinion’, but we tend to go to the disagreement rather than focusing on what we might have in common.

Natasha Mitchell: Yeah, that's fairly powerful. And your book actually gives a whole sweep of different strategies that people can try.

Ed Coper: That's right. Well, obviously the best thing anyone can do is buy the book.

Natasha Mitchell: The next question. Thank you.

Audience 2: Hello Jade Tirrell, secondee at the Human Rights Law Centre. My question is about whistleblowers, so thank you for your comments earlier, Helen. I also wanted to note that earlier iterations of what ultimately became the National Anti-Corruption Commission, earlier iterations of those bills contained a Whistleblower Protection Commissioner. I wanted to get your thoughts on whether you think a Whistleblower Protection Authority would be a good solution to support and protect whistleblowers, to try and improve the accountability crisis?

Helen Haines: Yeah, thanks for the question, Jade. Absolutely, I do. You're absolutely right. In in earlier iterations of an integrity commission, certainly in my own Australian Federal Integrity Commission bill, it contained exactly that a Whistleblower Protection Authority or a commission in my case. I've asked this in question times a few, a few times. And each time I get what is a pretty positive response that this is being looked at, I take that as a positive.

It's fundamental that we have a one stop shop that anyone who's thinking about trying to expose wrongdoing in the workplace has a safe house to go to, because we know that when people try to report up through the usual channels, they get blocked, they get isolated they get excluded. They often lose their job…

Natasha Mitchell: Ostracised, bullied, all of it.

Helen Haines: …to seek legal protection… It's difficult for a person in the workplace. So we absolutely do need this commission. We've seen the work in other jurisdictions around the world. I would be very, very happy to see this implemented. And I'm actively working on that hope to see that we fulfill that ambition.

Natasha Mitchell: Thank you. We had another question there. Great. Thank you

Audience 3: Jonathan Hunyor, from the Public Interest Advocacy Centre. I want to pick up the point you raised about the judiciary as a tool of accountability and to ask whether you think the judiciary up to the task or whether the institution is up to the task. Because one of the things that troubles me in an age of impunity is that some of the assumptions I think our legal common law makes and public law makes is, you know, politicians will be of different stripes, but they're fundamentally motivated by doing the right thing.

You know, often judges will defer to the sort of political decisions and matters of policy based on, I think, this assumption, which I think now looks quaint, if not dangerously the sort of naive. And we look to the United States or the UK where there is this impunity by prime ministers and presidents, do you think that the courts are going to be able to do that job when some of those assumptions, same as I say, like a quaint thing from another time.

Natasha Mitchell: Andrea Durbach.

Andrea Durbach: Thanks Jonathan, for the question. I as you were talking, I just had a remote a memory of Nelson Mandela when he was president. One of the first cases that the new constitutional court brought went against him and his government. And he stood outside the court and he said, ‘This has gone against me. I'm not happy with the decision, but I am happy that there is a court that is able to be free and independent and objective to come to this decision and to have the contestation play out and the veracity of the facts sorted. And I will hold by that and I will respect that decision’.

So I think if you have leaders who constantly are saying, unlike Trump, who are constantly saying how important this institution is to maintain a healthy democracy, the chances are that your judges will feel freer to make decisions against politicians. You have to enable that through leadership. And I do think courts are fit for purpose.

And I think what's happening with Trump is fascinating the way the courts in America are holding their guard. They really are. And they're taking this man down and on and God knows how it will all end up. But they are demonstrating their mettle. And I think when they feel empowered and enabled to do that, because they have community behind them and they have leaders saying ‘This a fundamental thing, we have to be vigilant about protecting its viability and its endure, its longevity’.

Yes, I think the courts are fit for purpose. I have great faith in in the judiciary, I have to say, and I know it's naive and I know the law is a two edged sword, but I just listening to you Ed as well, I think this the test of information and information and distortion of information, it's going to eventually be played out in the courts.

I think it's going to be a fascinating battle to be looked at. How do you challenge.. the courts are a really interesting stage for that contestation to take place and to test the veracity of facts. And if you once you get to an agreed set of facts that are kind of infallible…  you know, you saw that in the Ben Roberts-Smith decision.

It was formidable, what they had to deal with and how they actually adjudicated that in the end, in the interests of investigative journalism.

Ed Coper: Yeah. And we actually forget sometimes in the misinformation debate that we have an institution that is empowered to find out what is true and what is false. And that happens every day that's how the law operates.

And, you know, the current government is proposing powers for men to decide that something is harmful, disinformation, ocean and force the social media platforms to take it down. And people are up in arms saying, ‘How on earth can we trust anyone to tell us what's true and what's false?’ That's what the courts do. That's what they're there. They're there to find fact and find truth.

And I think we should, you know, restore our trust in that as an institution, because it's going to become increasingly important.

Natasha Mitchell: And that disinformation legislation proposal, though, has its attendant concerns around freedom of speech and censorship as well. Let's take another question and then we need to wrap up. Thank you.

Audience 4: Hello, and thank you to the whole panel. I just want to touch on Andrea's commentary around reparations and that they really resonate with me. I want to open it up to the panel about how advocates and people in this space can really try a culture towards accountability that balances the punishment of people who abuse power and holding the accountability to remedy those who've been harmed or manipulated by those institutions.

Natasha Mitchell: Who would you like to respond and do you want to do people clear on what's being asked? Maybe elaborate a little bit more.

Audience 4: Earlier on, I was sort of caught on the idea of accountability and focus on the perpetrator and those who have abused the trust. And that is the story. But I was really interested in perspectives of more community focused or restorative justice when it comes to accountability and misuse of institutional power.

Natasha Mitchell: So I think that focus on, in a sense, the survivors of abuse, the survivors of atrocities.

Andrea Durbach: Yeah, I think that's such an interesting question. In fact, we had to face that when we were doing the Defence Force work. When I was involved in the task force where we decided that instead of holding perpetrators of sexual assault to account, the criminal justice system was there to do that, what was more important for us, was to actually hold the institution, the Defence Force, to account in some way.

And what we did was, we devised a model drawing on restorative justice and mediation techniques, where we brought very senior members of the leadership in the Defence Force with face to face with people who made complaints about sexual abuse and sexual misconduct. And what that did was it actually forced the institution to say ‘This could never happen in the Defence Force and under my watch, we protect citizens.

We don't abuse citizens’. To hear from people who were actually victims of that sort of conduct. And here, the Defence Force's response, which initially was hushed it up, ‘We’ll pay you off, go and do something else, we’ll give you a pension for the rest of your life’, whatever. And there were terrible instances of that happening. The cover ups, instead of which there were senior members of the leadership in Defence, were saying, ‘We have to we have to deal with this. This is a collective duty of the Defence Force to take this on and change our policy, but also to expose it, to give transparency, encourage participation by people’.

And so there was, there were counsellors put in place, there was compensation paid. The actual restorative engagement conference was an amazing process to watch. A senior member of Defence Force face to face with a very junior member who'd been assaulted, and to see the change in perception and understanding and appreciate the nature of that harm. And then to devise some sort of reparation with that person face to face with them that would make them feel better and very often all that was required was an apology, or a validation of that experience. Nothing more.

Natasha Mitchell: Such a powerful scene to conclude on, and I think it really talks to the fact that with each of you, relationships. You know that when we stare into the face of another person and a lot of the sort of the artifice and the political party around us or whatever, when we stare into the face of another person, at some point there's some truth telling that happens.

I can't thank you enough, Andrea. Thank you. And to you and the team for putting on this event for us. And thank you for all for being here. Please thank Dr. Shireen Morris, Professor Andrea Durbach, Ed Coper, Dr. Helen Haines and Simon Holmes à Court.

Centre for Ideas: Thanks for listening. For more information, visit centreforideas.com. And don't forget to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.