Highlights
Among the many highlights of the Victorian Corruption Prevention and Integrity Conference were:
- Insights from keynote speaker Dr Anna Sergi into the world of organised crime and infiltration into the public sector, including a case study on Rome. She introduced the audience to the term ‘leadership disease’, describing how public leaders can become corrupted
- Victorian Ombudsman Deborah Glass OBE and Chief Municipal Inspector David Wolf outlined real-life examples of governance failures
- The Hon. Kim Wells and the Hon. Stephen Charles spoke about the importance of integrity oversight mechanisms
- Special Minister of State, the Hon. Gavin Jennings, told of the need to strengthen protected disclosure legislation and improve the capability to address wrongdoing
- Auditor-General Andrew Greaves broadened the concept of integrity to include efficiency (‘you can be honest and ethical but totally ineffective’)
- Victoria Police presenters described their preferred leadership style (‘tone at the top’) as ‘confident humility’, and spoke about moving towards a discloser-centric rather than investigative approach to reporting of possible corrupt conduct
- And those at the conference dinner were entertained by the anecdotes of Walkey Award-winning journalist and ‘Underbelly’ author John Silvester.
Workshops reminded people of:
- listening to people who call out wrongdoing to ensure they have effective support
- the importance of developing the right culture for people to speak up and report wrongdoing
- what can occur when position and resources are used for personal gain
- the need to build strong reporting systems and mechanisms
- treating complaints as opportunities to improve services
- the need for ethical culture and leadership to support the effectiveness of codes of conduct and integrity frameworks
- the importance of conducting integrity health checks within organisations
- accepting that conflicts of interest will occur; what’s important is how they’re managed
- how scope creep can be a problem in investigations
- how good data cannot be mined from bad data.