This chapter complements Chapter 6 in Government Accountability: Australian Administrative Law, third edition. Information disclosure is fundamental to all areas of administrative law. Whether a request for information comes from a superior court, a parliamentary committee, a royal commissioner, an ombudsman, a journalist, or an individual questioning a government decision, access to information is essential when holding governments to account. The sources in this chapter consider secrecy, unofficial disclosures by leaks and whistleblowers, statutory obligations of the executive to publish information, and the rights of individuals to apply for access to government-held information and reasons for decisions.

This chapter complements Chapter 6 in Government Accountability: Australian Administrative Law, third edition. Information disclosure is fundamental to all areas of administrative law. Whether a request for information comes from a superior court, a parliamentary committee, a royal commissioner, an ombudsman, a journalist, or an individual questioning a government decision, access to information is essential when holding governments to account. The sources in this chapter consider secrecy, unofficial disclosures by leaks and whistleblowers, statutory obligations of the executive to publish information, and the rights of individuals to apply for access to government-held information and reasons for decisions.

This chapter examines the Court’s government speech docket to date, which has focused on disputes that require it to determine when the government itself is speaking and when it is instead regulating others’ speech. It explains how the constitutional rules for the government as regulator of others’ speech differ from those that apply to the government as speaker: when the government itself is speaking, then the Free Speech Clause constraints on the government as regulator do not apply. It then offers a framework for approaching these problems that emphasizes the value of transparency—that is, an insistence that the governmental source of a message be transparent to the public as a condition of claiming the government speech defense to a Free Speech Clause challenge. It then applies the transparency principle to difficult first-stage problems to come that will require courts to unravel competing governmental and nongovernmental claims to the same speech, to determine when an individual government official speaks as the government or instead as a private citizen, and to ascertain when an individual public employee’s speech is the actually the government’s to control.

Whistleblowers speak out about illegal or unethical actions at work. One of most striking aspects of listening to whistleblowers is how they feel silenced. As one whistleblower put it, "They wouldn't talk about it, and they wouldn't talk about not talking about it." Silence does not just mean the absence of speech. Silence means that one party to the dialogue refuses to engage the other. Whistleblowers try to talk about what the organization is doing. Their bosses will only talk about the whistleblowers and their problems. "Nuts and sluts" is the name given to this strategy by experienced whistleblowers, in which the goal of the organization is to turn the issue into one of the mental health or morality of the whistleblower. What is unsaid, what cannot be spoken, is almost always the moral and ideological corruption of the organization. Corruption means the loss of an organization's mission. Society is a conspiracy of silence against those who cross an invisible boundary that most of us will not recognize, for to do so would establish our willingness to do almost anything to belong.