Yesterday's sentencing outcome for the whistleblower who revealed Frances Abbott's scholarship shows just how petty the case was. It also shows how much we need a Commonwealth anti-corruption body, writes Michael Bradley.

Freya Newman hasn't suffered quite as much as Alfred Dreyfus, but the notoriety of her name has similarly transcended the actual significance of her legal case and become a cause célèbre for freedom fighters of all stripes.

Both those flying the standard of our right to privacy, and the advocates of our right to know, are busily flogging poor Freya's remaining personal dignity to death.

You know when an issue has gone into fantasy overdrive when Christopher Pyne chooses to tweet about it, as he did yesterday. Does the sentencing decision of a NSW Local Court magistrate warrant the personal intervention of the Federal Minister for Education? Apparently so.

For all the grand declaiming, the reality is that Freya is a victim of politics. Had her crime not embarrassed the Prime Minister, she would never have been charged. Nor would she now be receiving favourable comparisons with Joan of Arc from the large number of members of Team Australia who actually hate the team captain.

Time for some dispassionate analysis. First, the facts. The Whitehouse Institute is a private tertiary body. It awarded Frances Abbott, the then opposition leader's daughter, a scholarship which saved her family more than $60,000 in fees. The scholarship was not advertised and its existence was never made public. The Institute insists it was offered on the basis of academic merit but has offered nothing to substantiate this claim. The Institute's chairman was a substantial donor to the Liberal Party, and has confirmed that he "probably" recommended Ms Abbott for the scholarship.

It smells pretty bad, as some senior staff members at the Institute thought. Freya Newman was 20 years old and a junior part time employee. She was told by more senior staff where she could access information regarding the scholarship in the Institute's computer system, and encouraged to do so using another staff member's log in details. She did it, and then she resigned.

The Institute wanted to press charges, and Ms Newman was charged under s308H(1) of the Crimes Act with obtaining unauthorised access to restricted data held in a computer. The maximum penalty is two years' imprisonment. Ms Newman promptly pleaded guilty. The prosecution accepted that her offence was at the lowest end of the range of severity. The magistrate decided that the fair result was to record no conviction, but with a two-year good behaviour bond attached. Ms Newman's youth, and her altruistic motivation, appear to have been significant factors in the magistrate's mind. Any harsher outcome would have been ridiculous.

Freya Newman leaves court after being handed a good behaviour bond. ( Twitter: triplejHack )

The case does raise important questions. It has been pointed out that, had the Institute been a public university, Ms Newman would most likely have been protected by whistleblower laws. Given that the Prime Minister's family obtained a substantial financial benefit from the scholarship, was there not a legitimate public interest in the disclosure? Should there be any difference if the alleged giving of favours comes from a private entity rather than a public one? Therefore, should not Freya Newman be lauded as a heroine rather than charged with a crime?

This is a very difficult question. The Whitehouse Institute is a private entity and is entitled to privacy. It is not in the same position as a government body or publicly funded organisation. If it wants to give away scholarships in a manner which undermines its pretensions to integrity, it can do so. That isn't a crime; it's just grubby.

However, there is a valid public interest in knowing what happened here, because corporate sector lobbying is a cancer on democratic politics and because we're entitled to know if our Prime Minister is being compromised.

If the problem is stated as being that, absent Freya Newman's actions, we'd never have found out about this, then the short answer is this: actually, the reason we didn't know about it is that the Prime Minister failed to comply with his parliamentary disclosure obligations. He is supposed to disclose financial benefits, and he has not explained why he didn't disclose the scholarship. The disclosure requirement exists to ensure any perceived risks of influence are exposed, with the subsidiary benefit that insiders with knowledge won't face Ms Newman's moral and legal dilemma.

But, he didn't disclose it and the dilemma arose. Where then is the correct balance between private rights and the public interest? It's not that what Ms Newman did shouldn't be a crime. Certainly it should only be a minor offence unless there are serious aggravating factors. The sentencing outcome underlines how petty this was.

Part of the answer has been loudly shouted lately by our chief law officer, Attorney General George Brandis. On the unrelated topic of the jailing of journalists for disclosing ASIO operations, he has been going on about how the Director of Public Prosecutions is obliged to consider the public interest before launching any prosecution. The same principle applies to all prosecuting authorities.

It's certainly arguable that the prosecutorial discretion ought to have been exercised in Freya Newman's case to recognise that she was collateral damage in a much larger war and that there was no public interest in inflicting more punishment on her than she had already suffered.

And there's another answer. If the Prime Minister had been a NSW parliamentarian, ICAC would have had jurisdiction to investigate. An anonymous tip-off would have sufficed and ICAC's coercive powers would have done the rest.

In the end, that's what the Freya Newman case really means: we badly need an anti-corruption body in the Commonwealth sphere, with all the powers of ICAC and the ability to protect whistleblowers no matter where they work.

Michael Bradley is the managing partner of Marque Lawyers, a boutique Sydney law firm. View his full profile here.