The Australian government’s complaints umpire has been accused of letting down academic whistleblowers, after claiming that it receives no funding to police the management of public interest disclosures (PIDs) and does not “revisit” past cases.

Commonwealth Ombudsman Iain Anderson has dismissed a senator’s questions about his office’s failure to compel the Australian National University (ANU) to release information about its handling of a 2017 PID from the former head of its music school, Peter Tregear.

A 2019 report from consultancy Deloitte, which had been contracted by ANU to investigate Tregear’s complaints, found no evidence to substantiate them. The Commonwealth Ombudsman, whose role includes overseeing compliance with the PID Act, assigned an investigator to review ANU’s handling of Tregear’s disclosure.

The investigator formed the view that Deloitte’s report “did not adequately explain the basis” for some of its findings, according to a submission Tregear lodged with last year’s Senate inquiry into university governance. But after ANU ignored her repeated requests for more information, the  investigator terminated her probe. “In…light of the ANU’s failure to respond to requests for information, she ‘did not think that further investigation would be likely to result in a different outcome’,” the submission says.

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Tregear’s PID included claims of nepotism, manipulation of financial accounts, a culture of disregarding health and safety issues and a managerial intent to run the music school into the ground by understaffing it. Eight years later, former Victorian police commissioner Christine Nixon delivered a on the “lack of proper accountability systems”, the “ineffective complaints management system”, the “poor and disrespectful culture” and the tolerance for “bias, nepotism and abuse” elsewhere in ANU.

In February, independent senator Lidia Thorpe lodged a ream of questions about the ombudsman’s handling of the Tregear case, including why it had not used its legislated powers to compel ANU to produce information, whether it routinely abandoned investigations when faced with agencies’ “recalcitrance” and whether Tregear had been “afforded procedural fairness”.

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A 15 April response from Anderson, who became ombudsman in late 2022, says he considers it inappropriate to “seek to revisit decisions of my predecessors”. He said he “endeavoured to perform my functions in an independent and robust manner”, but his office received no funding for its functions under the PID Act.

Anderson said that since 2019, no agency other than ANU had failed to cooperate with an ombudsman’s inquiry into a disclosure investigation. He did not answer Thorpe’s questions about whether the ombudsman’s review had been satisfactory, whether he would do things differently and why people should have confidence in his office’s handling of whistleblower complaints.

Tregear told Times Higher Education that Anderson’s response would have a chilling effect at universities, given that the ombudsman’s remit includes not only federal bodies such as ANU but also higher education institutions’ handling of student complaints through the National Student Ombudsman (NSO).

Tregear said no whistleblower could now be confident of getting a fair hearing, in a system where federal agencies investigated themselves. “He’s basically told the whole world that if that agency fails to do so adequately, surely a foreseeable risk, there is no practical means for recourse. That makes the system worse than useless. It appears to hold out the promise of accountability but is in effect a procedural dead end that disempowers the complainant and launders the complaint.”

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Tregear questioned the suggestion that the ombudsman’s office needed discrete funding to make agencies obey its directives. “It would probably cost a public servant, what, A$60 [£32] of time to write one letter and enforce statutory powers that they already have.”

Thorpe said the ombudsman’s “deeply unsatisfactory” response did not answer “important” questions, including why his office had not used its powers to force ANU to provide information.

She said the ombudsman’s reluctance to revisit unsatisfactory investigations conducted before his arrival made it hard for public servants to be confident that complaints about “inadequately investigated whistleblower disclosures” would be handled in accordance with “the intentions of the parliament and the expectations of the community”.

A whistleblower advocate, who asked not to be named, said vice-chancellors facing NSO questioning about institutional responses to student complaints would never get away with refusing to “revisit” their predecessors’ decisions.

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In a March report, the NSO chastised three universities over their handling of student complaints. A a week later claimed that the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) had “failed to appropriately action” recommendations from its internal reviews into complaint-handling processes. “Providers should act promptly to address issues they are specifically on notice of,” the NSO warned.

Thorpe has lodged six questions with ANU about its handling of Tregear’s disclosure. They remain unanswered despite a 9 April deadline. ANU said it took its responsibilities under the PID Act seriously and was “committed to responding at the earliest possible date”.

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john.ross@timeshighereducation.com