The government minister in charge of DFAT, Alexander Downer, had made a public statement inviting anyone with information about paedophilia in the department to come forward. But this rhetoric made little impact on DFAT top bureaucrats, who went ahead with their harassment of Gaisford. There was much more initiative taken against DFAT whistleblowers than to get to the bottom of allegations about paedophilia.
In general terms, whistleblowing can be thought of as the exercise of free speech to challenge injustice. The hope of the whistleblower is that when top officials realise the problem, they will take action to deal with it. What they commonly discover afterwards is that bureaucratic elites are far more concerned about covering up the problem than dealing with it. In all this, information and credibility are crucial elements.
In a tiny minority of cases, whistleblowers are congratulated for pointing out a problem, which is promptly dealt with. I will set these exceptional cases aside in order to concentrate on the typical response: cover up and attack the whistleblower. Authorities will deny that there is any problem. They will refuse to supply documentation. They will undertake reprisals to stop the whistleblower and to deter others.
To have any chance of success, whistleblowers need good documentation. That means that before speaking out, they should collect lots of information, for example copying relevant documents and perhaps getting statements from others. When the crunch comes, authorities often lie. They may deny that documents exist. They may destroy evidence. They sometimes even produce documents that have been altered or totally forged. An important piece of advice for many bureaucratic dissidents is not to speak out immediately, but instead to lie low and collect information, in order to have an irrefutable case.
Whistleblowers typically try formal channels first. They raise their concerns with their immediate boss, the top boss, an internal appeals procedure, an ombudsperson, a member of parliament, a government oversight body, the courts, and any other official body that seems relevant. The most common experience is that formal channels don’t work. This seems a sweeping statement. Bill De Maria and Cyrelle Jan collected information from hundreds of whistleblowers who had taken their cases to dozens of different official bodies. Less than one out of ten appeals to an official body gave any sort of positive response.[8]
There is evidence that significant corruption is found in most large police forces. Citizens who complain about corruption usually get nowhere. Police who report corruption by their colleagues can seldom survive in the force. Harassment of police whistleblowers is commonly severe and sometimes brutal.
Why don’t the official channels work? At this point it is valuable to remember that bureaucracies are hierarchical. Those higher up are the superiors of those further down. Whistleblowers expose shortcomings by those higher up than they are. This threatens the hierarchy. Internal appeals procedures are set up by bureaucratic elites and are either staffed by elites or employees dependent on them. The result is a strong reluctance to support a person lower down against anyone higher up.
Outside appeal procedures are little better. To take the side of a mere employee against those at the top of an organisation is a frontal challenge to the elites, who are likely to have friends and allies in other organisations. Appeal bodies such as ombudsmen typically have limited funds, limited mandates and little power to bring about change. No wonder they tread softly.
A cynic might suggest that formal procedures and bodies are set up precisely in order to lure dissidents into never-ending appeals, which bog them down in technicalities and trivialities while nothing is done about the problem. Whatever the intent, this is the effect of many procedures and bodies. Information about the problem is kept inside the organisation where it can do little damage.
Whistleblowers usually have far greater impact when they go outside the organisation and official channels, instead taking their message to a wider audience. Media coverage is a particularly potent challenge to a bureaucracy. It takes the issue out of the hands of the bureaucracy and into the eyes of the general public. Top bureaucrats absolutely detest publicity.
Sending a letter to the head of a bureaucracy seldom has much of an impact. Getting the same letter published in a newspaper has a much greater impact. The bureaucrats will all read it, knowing that thousands of others will be reading it too.
Some whistleblower protection laws actually specify that whistleblowers will not be protected if they go to the media. Instead, they have to go to government agencies set up or designated to receive complaints from whistleblowers. This is a good way to keep the problem “in-house.” Media coverage allows lots of people to hear about the problem.
It may seem strange recommending media coverage as a benefit to whistleblowers when I have argued that mass media should be replaced with network media. Right now, both bureaucracies and mass media are systems of information inequality and are subject to the corruptions of power. Sometimes one such system can be used against the other, such as when government regulatory bodies restrain large media corporations and when media coverage exposes abuses in bureaucracies. The important thing is not to rely on these sorts of controls, which amount to one powerful group restraining or undermining another. A strategy against corruptions of information power should aim to undermine all these groups.
Sometimes the media will not cover a story, perhaps due to the influence of local vested interests or fear of defamation. The old-fashioned leaflet is one option. Richard Blake, a public servant in New South Wales, helped set up a reform group. The members produced leaflets and on some occasions handed them out to other employees as they entered government buildings. With electronic mail, the potential for distributing information is even greater.
In 1989, David Rindos took up a senior lectureship in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Western Australia. Soon after, he became acting head of the department and was told of serious problems affecting students, including sexual relations between staff and students, favouritism and discrimination. He reported these problems and as a result came under attack himself, eventually being denied tenure in 1993 in spite of more than adequate teaching and research. He pursued his case through the university’s formal channels and then tried the Industrial Relations Tribunal, the University Visitor, the Ombudsman and the West Australian Parliament, as well as using Freedom of Information legislation to obtain documents.
The university hierarchy refused to set up a full-scale investigation of the problems originally raised by Rindos and asserted that all proper procedures had been followed in the case of his tenure. In this situation, a lone individual has almost no chance of making any impact on a resolute administration. Rindos and his supporters were able to make progress through publicity. They alerted archaeologists around the world about the tenure denial and subsequently dozens of leading archaeologists wrote to the university in support of Rindos. Media coverage gradually developed. The local Sunday Times published many supportive stories. However, the daily West Australian published nothing at all until 1996, when it ran a week-long massive attack on Rindos. By this time, though, quite a number of powerful people were convinced that the whole thing needed an independent investigation. Although the university set up its own in-house investigation, the West Australian parliament established a wide-ranging inquiry.
Along the way, Rindos used electronic mail, and occasionally the ordinary post, to powerful effect. He had a mailing list of supporters and interested individuals around the country and beyond. He sent out accounts of the latest events and text of stories in the local media. One of his supporters, Hugh Jarvis in the United States, set up a web site with large numbers of documents about the case. In fact, there was so much material that it became difficult to make sense of the issue at a glance.[9]
8
William De Maria and Cyrelle Jan, “Behold the shut-eyed sentry! Whistleblower perspectives on government failure to correct wrongdoing,”