This piece was first published in The Sun Herald today.
Why do they do it, these whistleblowers? Why do they dare speak out? Whether in the private or public sector, often they lose their livelihoods, and the strain can damage their health, end their closest relationships and smash their friendships. Almost always they are smeared, threatened and put under intolerable psychological pressure.
What do they get in return for their courage, their defiant insistence that one person can make a difference and must, when faced with a choice between right and wrong, look the powerful people in their world in the eye and say “No!”?
They get pats on the back from some of us for a little while, but in the end they’re alone with the friends they have left when the fair-weather ones have gone.
Lance Collins this week joined a growing list of public service whistleblowers who’ve stood up for truth, the public’s right to be told it, and the public interest. Mahatma Gandhi said that whatever we do in the world is insignificant, but that it is very important that we do it. That’s because when enough of us are brave enough to stand up for what is right, the world will change. And part of standing up is looking after our whistleblowers.
Unless we start doing what we can to back them, the public service will be beyond repair. It’s our public service, in the end, and its ethics and commitment to the public interest are a bedrock of our democracy.
Robert Menzies put it well in 1942 in one of his “forgotten people” broadcasts: “Do not underrate the civil servant. He is for the most part anonymous and unadvertised, but he is responsible for by far the greater part of the achievements sometimes loudly claimed by others. He provides, as a witty friend of mine once said, ‘a level of competence below which no government can fall’.”
Just as ethics have collapsed in business, the ethos of service and duty is almost gone from the public service. Don’t give the government the facts, because it doesn’t want to know. Without the facts, or honest risk and effects assessments, the Government avoids taking moral responsibility for what it does, and can safely lie to us. In return, senior public servants get “performance bonuses”, job security and “status”. Why, they even get onto honours lists.
Funny, isn’t it, that Collins didn’t get an official award for his work in East Timor. Courageous, ethical people who care for their country and fight for its values don’t get honoured by governments in the main. Who will honour our democratic torchbearers?
Web diarist Peter Gellatly wrote: “All the evidence points to the public having a very short attention span, and, subsequent to a fast but fleeting bout of moral outrage, not really giving a damn. This lack of public support is responsible for a dearth of overt fearless principle in the public service. The putatively courageous might be forgiven for concluding that the public they serve does not value, and is therefore not entitled to expect, the whistleblower’s inevitable personal sacrifice – a sacrifice borne not just by the individual but by his/her family.”
Web diarist Jamie Clark quoted Stanford University professor of philosophy Richard Rorty, who believes the West is becoming post democratic: “The progress humanity made in the 19th and 20th centuries was largely due to the increased role of public opinion in determining government policies. But the lack of public concern about government secrecy has, in the last 60 years, created a new political culture in each of the democracies. In a worst-case scenario, historians will some day have to explain why the golden age of Western democracy lasted only about 200 years. The saddest pages in their books are likely to be those in which they describe how the citizens of the democracies, by their craven acquiescence in governmental secrecy, helped bring the disaster on themselves.”
How can we avoid this terrible trend? Wouldn’t it be great if we raised money for a whistleblowers’ fund for our nurses in NSW who spoke out about the decay of our hospitals; Lance Collins, who spoke out about intelligence services corruption; Andrew Wilkie, who told us before the Iraq war that the Government was lying; and many others. So many “ordinary” people have turned their lives inside out for us. We need to show them it’s worth it. There could be annual awards, but there’d be ongoing financial support too, and hideaway homes when the going got tough, and help in finding work.
The balance of power is so stacked against the ethical individual that unless citizens do something to redress it, we’ll run out of whistleblowers. We’ll miss them when they’re gone.