IBAC Insights (newsletter)

Corruption undermines good government.  It engenders distrust in institutions and processes.  It trashes public value.  

Those of us who work in public service or receive public services all want public value. We want public assets used well, we want fairness, client satisfaction and good and effective outcomes.

As a researcher, I frequently participate in meetings convened by the World Bank or the United Nations. At these meetings people from all continents and cultures invariably look at me and say that I am so lucky to come from Australia which has no corruption. It is true that – unlike citizens in many countries – bribery and shake-downs are not part of the everyday costs of doing business for Australians. While we are less corrupt than most, it can and does happen. 

The perception of Australia as a corruption-free country is changing and our reputation has lost some of its lustre. Australia is gradually sliding down the rankings in the Transparency International Perceptions of Corruption index. In 2014 we fell out of the top 10, landing at number 11, and our score fell to 80 from a possible 100. In the latest rankings for 2015 it fell again, to number 13 with a score of 79, considerably below the high-80s it was getting just a few years ago.

The issue for Australia is about pride in our ethical standards, and having the credibility to lead in our region. Outcomes from investigations by Victoria's Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission and the Independent Commission Against Corruption in NSW, and the various recent royal commissions, have brought to light that much of what goes on here is well below the standards we should expect.

When corruption is exposed, we are justifiably and seriously aggrieved.  We expect better, and we are outraged when people use public office to enrich themselves. 

An Eastern European colleague was telling me that bribes were the most prevalent form of crime in his country, far outweighing burglary, car theft or violent crime.  The rationale that people gave was that they had to pay a public servant to get better service, or in some cases any service at all.  We take access to services for granted.  He went on to say that corruption had moved from being a transgression to being a system.

If there is a risk of corruption turning from a transgression to a system, we face a massive failure of process, culture and leadership.  This is why, following recent investigations, the Victorian government needs to be ahead of the game in building integrity in its institutions. Early in IBAC’s establishment, I undertook a survey of the Victorian public service which showed a strong endorsement of and commitment to integrity, but that corruption was generally not on the radar. Following IBAC’s exposure of serious and systemic cases of corruption in the Victorian public sector, it is hoped that corruption is now firmly on the agenda for public sector leaders in this state.

More than anything else corruption prevention and enhancing integrity are matters of leadership.  Not just an issue for Departmental secretaries but for anybody who leads people and processes.  Ethical decision making helps create public value by shaping organisational culture and protecting our institutions, and this impacts on the wider community and all our stakeholders. There are long laundry lists of the characteristics of ethical behaviour, trustworthiness, responsibility, fairness, accountability, etc. Everybody agrees that we should strive for these things in our public lives. The challenge is how to identify threats to integrity and how to counter these threats.

The most notable threats are peer culture, rigidity, denial of accountability, and one of my next research tasks is to identify the slippage points in agencies that allow these threats to manifest themselves and threaten to turn transgressions into systems.

Some say we are lucky we do not live with rampant corruption. We did once, and since the earliest colonial days we have built stable institutions, good processes and public value. We have had times when corrupt systems ruled (police corruption in Queensland pre-Fitzgerald, regulating drinking hours, gambling and abortion) but our institutions are fairly robust today. However all can be undone very quickly if behaviour gets out of hand and agencies either tolerate it or look the other way. We have a great leadership challenge to be corruption free, and our leaders will certainly rise to the task. 

Adam Graycar is a professor of public policy in the School of Social and Policy, Flinders University.