In December last year The Canberra Times published an article by me expressing concern about the Merit Protection Review Agency’s investigation at the Australian War Memorial.
Essentially, that article said there was something irregular about the way the process was put in train. The minister in charge of the public service, Gary Johns, launched it without the knowledge of the Minister in charge of the memorial, Con Sciacca. It said the agency, normally a body that defends public servants subject of disciplinary procedures, was now put in a prosecutorial role to investigate harassment, but without the normal safeguards of fairness that prosecutors normally apply.
In short, the article said the process was flawed and had delivered an injustice to the director and deputy director of the memorial.
After the article was published, The Canberra Times published a letter from the director of the MPRA, Ann Forward, saying, it “”must surely have been one of the most appalling pieces of journalism ever published in the newspaper which claims to serve the national city and through it the nation . . . . The article . . . displayed complete ignorance of the role of the agency and the law. . . . For the record the MPRA has complied with the procedures for investigating workplace harassment.”
Justice Finn has now found that it was the MPRA which displayed a complete ignorance of its own function and a complete ignorance of the law. It is the MPRA which has engaged in one of the most appalling pieces of bureaucratic witchhunting.
Unfortunately, Justice Finn, like me, was unable to get to the bottom of the story. The launching of this inquiry was done in such an unusual and irregular way that it suggests the exercise of some personal vendetta backed by some person’s unusual ability to sway decision-makers from their ordinary course of duty.
This is not merely a case of the train coming off the rails, but one of someone laying the rail and sleepers for a sidetrack and switching the signals to send the train down it.
If the mantra of “”harassment” is capable of doing this; then we’d better be more careful next time it is chanted.