Transparency for the Planet

6:00pm – 7:30pm
Hobart Town Hall
Free event, registration essential

About the event

The Human Rights Law Centre and the Australia Institute Tasmania are partnering to deliver ‘Transparency for the Planet: Whistleblowing and the ecosystem of accountability’, a town hall panel event uniting community, industry and government together to talk about the various accountability mechanisms in Tasmania and our broken whistleblowing laws. We will be joined by some of Tasmania’s leading voices on truth and transparency and have a solutions-oriented discussion around industry and government accountability.

Regina Featherstone is a Senior Lawyer at the Human Rights Law Centre’s Whistleblower Project, Australia’s first legal service dedicated to protecting and empowering whistleblowers to speak up when they witness wrongdoing. She will moderate the panel where we will hear from leading voices on transparency and accountability for the environment in Tasmania. The event coincides with the launch of the Human Rights Law Centre’s Environment & Climate Whistleblowing Guide, a practical resource to encourage individuals to come forward and speak up for our planet.

Join us to hear from an expert panel about the state of whistleblower laws in Tasmania and how these laws fit in within the wider ecosystem of accountability.

Speakers

• Eloise Carr, Director, Australia Institute Tasmania: Democracy and Accountability in Tasmania
• Regina Featherstone, Senior Lawyer at the Human Rights Law Centre: Whistleblower Project and panel moderator

Panellists

• The Hon. Meg Webb, MLC
• Claire Bookless, Managing Lawyer, EDO
• Louise Cherrie, environmental management specialist and a former member of the Tasmanian Marine Farming Planning Review Panel
• Thirza White, General Secretary, CPSU Tasmania

About our speakers and panellists

Claire Bookless, EDO

Claire Bookless is the Managing Lawyer of the lutruwita/Tasmanian branch of the Environmental Defenders Office Ltd. EDO is a community legal centre dedicated to protecting the environment.

Claire provides advice and representation to Tasmanian clients on state and federal environmental and planning law. She has achieved successful outcomes for clients in a range of cases including relating to World Heritage and National Heritage-listed areas, threatened species and communities and Aboriginal cultural heritage. She recently authored an EDO report called Transparent failure: Tasmania’s ineffective right to information system and how to fix it, which outlined alarming statistics on the release of government information in Tasmania and provided solutions to address the problem. Before joining EDO, Claire undertook environmental prosecutions and other litigation for the Queensland Government.

Claire holds Bachelor’s degrees in Law (Hons) and Environmental Science from Griffith University and has over 15 years’ experience practising as an environmental lawyer in Tasmania, Queensland and Victoria.

Louise Cherrie

Louise is the Director of a consultancy servicing high risk clients throughout Australia across a number of sectors. Louise has a passion for delivering pragmatic environmental risk and compliance solutions within a complex regulatory environment. Louise is a former Tasmanian EPA Board Member and has most recently sat on the Marine Farming Review Panel providing advice to the Minister on where and how to farm salmon in Tasmania. She approached those roles with the firm belief that our environmental and economic goals are wholly compatible when sustainability principles are applied to developments. The unwillingness of industry, Government and other Panel members to embrace scientific fact and lived history resulted in Louise’s reluctant resignation along with esteemed biosecurity and fish health expert Professor Barbara Nowak.

Regina Featherstone, Human Rights Law Centre

Regina Featherstone is a Senior Lawyer in the Human Rights Law Centre’s Whistleblower Project, the first pro bono legal service in Australia dedicated to protecting whistleblowers and creating stronger public interest accountability mechanisms in the government and private sector. Her work focuses on assisting whistleblowers to come forward with allegations of environmental wrongdoing and misdeeds of the fossil fuel industry.

Prior to joining the Human Rights Law Centre, Regina was a Senior Associate at Allens and an employment law/anti-discrimination solicitor at Redfern Legal Centre. Regina has also worked as a refugee lawyer in Nauru and Australia for several years. 

Regina was jointly awarded the first Social Justice Practitioner-in-Residence (23/24) at The University of Sydney, conducting research on sexual harassment and non-disclosure agreement use. You can read her co-authored research report: Let’s Talk About Confidentiality.

Eloise Carr, The Australia Institute

Eloise Carr is Director of the Australia Institute’s Tasmanian branch. Eloise is a policy and governance professional and former public servant who now leads the Australia Institute’s presence in Tasmania, focusing on issues of good government and environmental sustainability.

Meg Webb MLC, Independent Member for Nelson

Meg was elected to the Legislative Council in 2019, after two decades working in the community sector, most recently in social policy, research and advocacy with organisations such as TasCOSS and Anglicare’s Social Action and Research Centre.

Strengthening our democracy, integrity and transparency in government are key priority areas for Meg.  Since her election to the State Parliament Meg has strongly advocated for a range of integrity reforms.  Meg fought hard  to improve Tasmania’s first ever political donation laws debated last year. Her successful motion in the upper house in 2023 prompted the government to begin quarterly publishing of Ministerial diaries, and she is actively participating in the Integrity Commission’s development of a new Lobbyist Framework. Most recently Meg moved successfully to establish the inaugural Tasmanian Parliamentary Joint House Committee on Electoral Matters.

Thirza White, CPSU Tasmania

Thirza White is the General Secretary of the Tasmanian branch of the Community & Public Sector Union (CPSU). The Tasmanian Government is the biggest employer in Tasmania, with tens of thousands of public sector workers across our state – the CPSU is one of Tasmania’s oldest unions, representing public sector workers for over 127 years.  Thirza has been in the union movement for over 20 years, and has extensive knowledge of the issues facing public sector workers in Tasmania, as well as the role of unions in supporting public sector workers maintain transparency and accountability.