The travel rorts affair would not have come about unless someone blew the whistle.
The Howard Government, like government before it, has launched a police inquiry to find out who did the leaking. If the inquiry is successful no doubt the culprit will lose or her job and be charged with a criminal offence.
The law requires that whistle-blowers take complaints through proper channels, and the Opposition and the media are not proper channels.
In the case of the travel rorts you would have to wonder if it would have ever come to light without the leaks. It seems on present indications that evidence the malfeasance was presented to the proper channels, as far indeed as the office of the Minister for Administrative Services and indeed, according to some evidence, to the Prime Minister’s office itself. You can’t go much higher than that. But nothing happened. Nor would it have happened without the leak of the department file and other information to the Opposition and the media.
In this case the whistle-blower did the Australian public a great favour. Yet it was against the criminal law and a breach of his or her employment contract.
The travel rorts affair and other whistle-blowing examples show the two main reasons why whistle-blowers feel it necessary to avoid “”proper channels” and go straight to the Opposition or media. First, because often nothing happens after a proper-channels complaint, or it happens too slowly or the guilty go unpunished even if some repair work is done to check future malfeasance. Second, is the fear of reprisals.
The ACT has probably the best legislation in Australia to protect whistle-blowers. The Commonwealth’s new public-service legislation also proposes some protection. But both suffer from a fundamental weaknesses.
They only give protection for “”proper-channel” complaints. Instead they should relieve a whistle-blower from criminal prosecution or disciplinary action if the whistle-blowing or leak was to the media in some limited circumstances. Those circumstances should be if a “”proper-channel” complaint had resulted in no action or if the leaking overall proved in fact to result in a public benefit. The travel rorts whistle-blowing would fit those categories.
Fear of reprisals is justified, as the history of previous incidents shows. Legislation is all very well, but reprisals can take subtle forms that do not fit legislative injunction. Managed isolation is perhaps the best reprisal weapon. The whistle-blower is ostracised or given meaningless tasks even though salary and formal status is untouched.
The real problem is one of culture. The public sector is still a little influenced from the mores of last century and earlier this century when the public sector was very small and the civil service knew what was best. In such a culture, peer pressure and the demand to conform is intense, and deviance, even in the form of legitimate exposure of short-comings is despised and punished, often using informal institutional pressure.
But now that the public sector pervades the life of everyone it should be open to the widest possible scrutiny and criticism, and it should welcome that criticism as a mechanism for self-improvement, even if some of it is inevitably wide of the mark.
In the end, whistle-blowers cannot be protected by legislation. They can only be protected if the bureaucratic culture welcomes criticism and the exposure of malfeasance.
There is an irony here. Such a bureaucracy would be so open in the first place that the need and opportunity for whistle-blowing would almost vanish.
As it is, it is instructive that many whistleblowers prefer the direct leak tot he media. How embarrassing it should be for the bureaucracy that many whistle-blowers feel they can trust the confidentiality ethics of the much-despised profession of journalism in preference to relying on the “”proper channels”.
After all, journalists would go to jail themselves rather than divulge a whistle-blower; whereas bureaucrats would prefer to jail the whistle-blower.