Shooting the messenger
From left: Andrew Wilkie quit his intelligence job in 2003 and publicly questioned the government’s justifications for the Iraq war; Queensland nurse Toni Hoffman blew the whistle on Bundaberg Hospitalsurgeon Jayant Patel; Allan Kessing wrote damning reports on Sydney Airport security in 2003 while he was working for Australian customs; and Gillian Sneddon helped expose her boss, former NSW MP and convicted pedophile Milton Orkopoulos.
Photo: Joe Castro, Paul Harris, StevenAdvertisementAnnabel Stafford
April 19, 2008
LET'S play scruples.
You work for a large city council assessing development applications and you have just rejected a proposal from a big company because it fails crucial environmental tests. Despite your rejection, you learn that the project has been approved by the council and your negative assessment has disappeared from the file. When you ask your boss about it, he tells you you are no longer on the case and suggests you take some time off work.
What do you do? Blow the whistle on potential corruption or let it pass?
Probably, if you're like most of the 1859 public servants asked that same question as part of a major three-year study on whistleblowing in the Australian public sector, you say you'd report it. Only 4% of those surveyed said they would not do anything about it.
But chances are, if it really came down to it, you'd look the other way.
The same study, which began in 2005 and is due to finish early next year, found that 57% of 5473 public servants who said they had witnessed wrongdoing did not report the most serious instance of it. Of the 39% who did report the incident, only 17% were deemed true whistleblowers — they had reported something outside their area of duty and that was in the public interest. The rest had either reported the wrongdoing as part of their normal duties or were reporting a personal grievance.
Allan Kessing believes the number of people who would blow the whistle is even less than this. In 2003, while still working for Australian customs, Kessing wrote two damning reports on Sydney Airport security, which included the finding that airport security passes had been given to illegal immigrants, people with criminal convictions and even workers that didn't exist.
In 2005, Kessing's findings were reported by The Australian and the government took Kessing to court. Last year, he was found guilty of leaking the reports — which he denies — and was given a nine-month suspended sentence.
Before, as he puts it, "the faeces intersected with the fan", Kessing remembers speaking with his colleagues about the need for the reports to be made public. He says his small department of seven was "outraged" when Customs rejected the reports "and there was talk that we should leak (them)," he says. "But it was just talk."
Kessing, who was retiring, says he asked his colleagues: "Why don't you release it? How can you go on pretending (that everything is fine) and we have the best of all systems? You say it ought to be released and you think it should, but what are you going to do about it?"
His colleagues, he says, began "mumbling about their mortgages".
Another whistleblower, Gillian Sneddon, who helped expose her boss, the former NSW MP and convicted pedophile Milton Orkopoulos, agrees most people would not take the risk. "If you'd asked me … when I first reported (allegations about Orkopoulos), I'd have said 'of course everybody would do what I did'," she told The Age.
"But now, having done what I've done, I believe that most people would not have told the truth, no."
Sneddon says she was "treated like a traitor" after first raising pedophilia allegations with Orkopoulos and then with another NSW MP when Orkopoulos didn't respond. Orkopoulos then assured Sneddon he had reported the allegations to police. But when a detective came to the office about nine months later following further accusations, it became apparent that he had not and Sneddon began to help the police.
Shortly afterwards, unable to deal with the stress, Sneddon told the NSW Parliament — which employed her — of her situation and took workers' compensation leave, though she continued to help the police.
Sneddon still suffers anxiety and depression and was this year made redundant, ironically on the same day of the year that she took the stand against Orkopoulos. The NSW Parliament says Sneddon's dismissal had nothing to do with her whistleblowing, but while she is out of a job her colleagues — who did not help police — were effectively promoted. "They were rewarded for keeping quiet," she says.
Would it be any wonder, given Sneddon's treatment, that other potential whistleblowers would think twice about coming forward?
Andrew Wilkie — who in 2003 quit his job with the Office of National Assessments and publicly questioned the government's justifications for the Iraq war based on ONA intelligence — says that when asked for advice by other potential whistleblowers he "almost never" advises them to come forward, because "the cost in Australia is too high".
On the day Wilkie quit the ONA, and just before an article containing his claims was to appear in The Bulletin, the then ONA head, Kim Jones, called a press conference at Parliament House to tell Australia Wilkie had not been involved in the Iraq campaign and therefore didn't know what he was talking about. The following day, according to Wilkie, "one of John Howard's media staff worked the press gallery at Parliament House saying I was mentally unstable, because I had had marriage problems."
It's a far cry from the United States, says Wilkie, where in 2002 Time magazine featured three whistleblowers — who between them had exposed shortcomings in the FBI's investigation of terrorism leads before September 11, and blown the whistle on corporate scandals at Enron and WorldCom — as its "people of the year".
"That would never happen in Australia," he says, adding it is particularly tough to be a whistleblower in this country, because of Australians' innate conservatism and their reluctance to challenge the status quo. "It's unAustralian to dob in your mates."
But the Whistling While they Work study — which has included a survey of 7663 public officials across 118 state and commonwealth agencies — suggests the picture is not entirely grim. "As many as 12% of all public servants have reported some form of public interest wrongdoing in their organisation over a two-year period," the project's draft report estimates, "a figure equating to 197,000 public servants nationally."
That's a lot of whistleblowers who have not been destroyed. Indeed, project leader AJ Brown says that in at least 70% of cases whistleblowers said they were not treated badly. Two thirds believed their reports had at least been investigated.
The study also found there was not a certain "type" of person likely to become a whistleblower. Criminal psychologist Richard Wortley, who looked at the psychology of whistleblowers for the project, says circumstances are a better predictor than personality when it comes to who will become a whistleblower.
"People were much more inclined to report something … (if it) was directed towards them and there seemed a low threat associated with it," he says. "For example, they were much less likely to report a wrongdoing if the perpetrator was a lot more senior than them and there was more than one of them."
To the extent that personality was a factor, Wortley says the findings of the study contradicted the old view of whistleblowers as "disgruntled, aggrieved malcontents". Instead, those people who reported wrongdoing tended to have "somewhat higher job satisfaction and seemed organisationally committed," he says. Brown says it is important to correct the view of whistleblowers as rare and inevitably mistreated, because if you assume "every whistleblower suffers, then it's a licence for governments and agencies to do nothing because (it's par for the course)".
BUT he is quick to point out that the number of people who report wrongdoing is still very low. And the number of reprisals against whistleblowers — 22% report being persecuted — is way too high.
"In some agencies, the proportion of those who have blown the whistle on serious matters who say they were treated badly is less than 5%, but in others it's up to 40%."
As an example of what can go wrong when no one is willing to speak out, Brown points to the Department of Immigration. There must have been potential whistleblowers who believed there were problems with the treatment of Cornelia Rau, wrongfully detained for 10 months, or Vivian Alvarez Solon, wrongfully deported, who "didn't say anything", Brown says.
Likewise, there must have been colleagues of obstetrician Graeme Reeves, "the Butcher of Bega", who might have seen or heard something and could have stopped him allegedly mutilating hundreds of patients.
"Where there is a poor response to whistleblowers there is a weaker culture of speaking up and things go unreported, which means more and more people are going to be affected (by the wrongdoing)," Brown says.
Queensland nurse Toni Hoffman, who blew the whistle on Bundaberg Hospital surgeon Jayant Patel, says that when she began to make complaints about Patel in 2004, she was told by hospital management that she was the one with the problem. She was a bad communicator, had poor conflict resolution skills; Patel even accused her of racism.
Hoffman "shudders to think" what would have happened had she not gone to her local member of parliament when she did. "If I hadn't said anything I don't know how long it would have taken (to expose Patel)," she says. "It was only the fact that a journalist (Hedley Thomas, then with The Courier Mail) googled his name (that they found out he was a fraud)," she says.
In a bid to encourage disclosures in the public interest, the Rudd Government has promised legislation to provide some protection for whistleblowers who have gone public after efforts to internally address wrongdoing have come to nothing.
In NSW, in the wake of the Graeme Reeves scandal, the NSW Government announced it would make it mandatory for doctors to report the misdeeds of their colleagues. In Victoria too, whistleblower legislation is being reviewed.
But Brown warns that legislation, on its own, can do very little to improve the situation. One need only look at the fact that Hoffman's persecution occurred in Queensland, "which has the most comprehensive whistleblower protection in the country," he says. "It really demonstrates that it doesn't matter how good legislation is if it's not implemented (in each agency)."
Sneddon believes no legislation can dictate the human conscience. "There are always going to be people who have no backbone and that lie, that are more interested in their own positions than telling the truth and that's why it comes down to what a person's all about," she says.
"I don't know how that's going to change."
FAMOUS WHISTLEBLOWERS
COLEEN ROWLEY FBI agent who, in a leaked internal memo, accused the FBI of thwarting her office's efforts to investigate a terrorist lead before the September 11 attacks. Named one of Time's people of the year in 2002.
CYNTHIA COOPER Head of internal audit at WorldCom who helped uncover accounting fraud that had falsely inflated the company's bottom line before its bankruptcy in 2002. Named one of Time's people of the year in 2002.
SHERRON WATKINS Enron executive who warned Enron's chief of its dodgy accounting and her fears that it could "implode in a wave of accounting scandals" before it collapsed. Named one of Time's people of the year in 2002.
DAVID KELLY Widely thought to be the source of a BBC story that accused the British Government of "sexing up" its case for the Iraq war. Took his own life after a Government campaign to finger him as the source and undermine the BBC story.
MARK FELT Better known as "Deep Throat", the source that helped journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncover the Watergate scandal. The FBI officer "outed" himself in 2005.
Annabel Stafford is The Age Sydney correspondent
Tuesday, 23 August 2011
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