Federation Chamber (part 2 of 3)
18 August 2026
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Federation Chamber Australian Parliament
09:52 - 09:57
Speaker 1
Are there constituency statements by honorable members and I give the call to the member for Clark.
09:57 - 12:18
Speaker 6
Deputy Speaker. Last week Australian Defence Force whistleblower David McBride was released on parole. I welcome this, but say again that he shouldn't have been in prison in the first place. Remember Mr. McBride provided evidence detailing war crimes committed by ADF personnel in Afghanistan, helping inform the ABC's Afghan files, clearly this was in the public interest. So he should have been lauded as a hero, but instead successive governments pursued him, eventually seeing him sentenced to five years and eight months in prison.
No wonder so many of us are relieved that Mr. McBride is now free. But his experience reflects a pattern of weak legal protections and a succession of antagonistic governments who'd rather punish whistleblowers than address their concerns. Which brings me to the latest case, this government's ongoing pursuit of Hillsong whistleblower Natalie Moses, laid bare in last weekend's lengthy and accurate article in the Australian. Deputy Speaker, you may recall that in 2023 I tabled some 40,000 documents in this chamber provided to me by Natalie Moses, showing how Hillsong had broken laws related to fraud, money laundering and tax evasion. But getting there or here wasn't easy, and I can draw no other conclusion than that Ms. Moses's lawyer and the government colluded in some way and that they tried to stop me publicizing the egregious Hillsong misconduct.
For instance, Ms Moses recounts that on the night of 9 September 2022, lawyer Josh Bornstein and the Assistant Minister for Charities, among other things, crossed paths at a Labor function, which dovetails perfectly with me getting a text that night from Dr Leigh asking me to call Mr Bornstein. Which I did, and Mr Bornstein told me that Ms Moses no longer wanted the documents tabled. But this wasn't Ms Moses's instructions to Mr Bornstein, which I didn't know at the time because Ms Moses was camping and uncontactable. In other words, Mr Bornstein and the government stand accused of colluding to silence a whistleblower. To cut a long story short, Ms Moses was furious and I tabled the documents six months later, in which case Mr Bornstein dropped Ms Moses as a client, claiming she had acted against his advice.
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