KEY POINTS:
A high-profile whistleblower is urging MPs to strengthen laws so that people like her are protected from retaliatory action after they have raised the alarm.
Deborah Houston - who blew the whistle on what she saw as a serious conflict of interest in a multi-million dollar tender process at the Hawkes Bay District Board - told a select committee yesterday of how she felt existing laws had failed her.
Mrs Houston was the board administrator at Hawkes Bay when she spotted an email related to a tender process involving a board member.
She alerted the board's chairman to a potential problem and made a disclosure under the Protected Disclosures Act, which protects people who speak out about serious wrongdoing in their workplaces.
But Mrs Houston later lost her job in a restructuring and she is convinced that she was made redundant as retaliation from management.
The health board has denied this, but Mrs Houston said she was frustrated that nobody had independently investigated her treatment.
She ended up taking up two personal grievance cases over the issue - the first ended with her receiving entitlements under the redundancy provisions of her contract but no compensation. The second one also ended in a settlement last September because the mounting legal bills became crippling, reaching $40,000.
During the second personal grievance case, the Minister of Health announced a review of the conflict of interest situation that she had alerted the board chairman to when she blew the whistle.
"I eventually settled because the DHB agreed to pay my legal costs," Mrs Houston said. "But again there was no admission that I had been disadvantaged or treated badly - there certainly was no personal compensation."
Mrs Houston decided to give up her anonymity under the Protected Disclosures Act when she heard Prime Minister Helen Clark indicate that her treatment would be addressed in the review ordered by the Minister of Health.
But after a meeting last July with the review panel she was eventually told late last year by the panel that it would not be looking into her treatmentafter all.
She approached the Office of the Ombudsmen to investigate her treatment, but was told the issue could be dealt with under employment laws.
Mrs Houston said she felt her whistleblowing case was different to normal employment disputes and there needed to be some kind of mandatory mechanism that made a body like the Ombudsmen look into retaliatory behaviour.
Outside the select committee hearing Mrs Houston said MPs considering changes to the Protected Disclosures Act needed to understand what happened to her.
"We talked about our experience because we just wanted to show that in my case, depending or relying on those employment procedures just didn't work," she said of her appearance with her partner John Crowther.
