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Why public servants leak

By Tony Kevin - posted Thursday, 12 June 2008


Leaking, or conspicuous public policy dissent, is most likely to happen in middle policy management - around assistant secretary and senior adviser level - where a good deal of politically sensitive material is accessible to people who might combine personal grievances with a still lively sense of the public interest.

Would a “Night of the Long Knives” have done anything to prevent the leak? Should Rudd have removed some notoriously Howard-compliant departmental heads upon taking office? Perhaps - not because any of these persons is likely to leak, but because their continued presence might send a demotivating signal to middle policy management that nothing much has changed in policy terms.

Thus, if a government that came in on a strong platform of social justice and human values continues to do things such as hound David Hicks, delay natural justice to Mohammed Haneef, clear up a backlog of refugee cases without much evidence of compassion, prosecute indefinitely a cruel civil war in Afghanistan, and do little to educate the public on the realities of global warming and peak oil, it might expect some public servants to leak.

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If accompanied by a real change in policy approach on such matters, reshuffling a few departmental heads might do some good in signalling to younger public servants that reform was underway. If not, it would simply be reshuffling the deckchairs in a public service that still feels a bit marginalised.

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First published in Eureka Street on June 5, 2008.



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About the Author

Tony Kevin holds degrees in civil engineering, and in economics and political science. He retired from the Australian foreign service in 1998, after a 30-year career during which he served in the Foreign Affairs and Prime Minister’s departments, and was Australia’s ambassador to Poland and Cambodia. He is currently an honorary visiting fellow at the Australian National University’s Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies in Canberra. He has written extensively on Australian foreign, national security, and refugee policies in Australia’s national print media, and is the author of the award-winning books A Certain Maritime Incident – the Sinking of SIEV X, and Walking the Camino: a modern pilgrimage to Santiago. His third book on the global climate crisis, Crunch Time: Using and abusing Keynes to fight the twin crises of our era was published by Scribe in September 2009.

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