When the whistle is blown
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 24: Participation Society
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by AJ Brown
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AJ Brown's biography and other articles by this writer
It was early 1996, and getting late in the evening. Somewhere in a nondescript building in central Canberra, I was prowling a largely empty open-plan office, killing time while an Australian Federal Police investigator and I waited for yet another police officer to come off the late shift, somewhere across town, and make his way to us for a confidential interview.
My job, as a young lawyer in the Commonwealth Ombudsman's office, was simply to ‘sit in' on the interviews as the police tried to resolve some complex allegations. A junior police whistleblower – let's call him Constable Tim – was claiming he had been harassed by colleagues after he told AFP Internal Security about serious misconduct in another part of the force. The misconduct was proven, and action taken. But since then, life for the constable had not gone smoothly.
Our office was involved because Tim himself had come to us that morning, concerned about the police investigation into the alleged harassment. After due consideration, someone decided we had better take a look at the AFP's internal inquiry. So there I was, that same night, observing silently while more young police were hauled in to tell internal investigators whether they knew of any bad treatment being dished out to the stressed constable. Of course, none did. Why would they? But the process of interviewing them was certainly helping alienate Tim from the rest of the organisation.
One of Tim's concerns was even stranger. The previous week, AFP staff had arranged what he thought was a meeting with an outside psychologist, to help manage the stress of the various investigations. But at the end of the session, his ‘counsellor' revealed he was actually a psychiatrist, and that AFP staff had asked him for a report on whether Tim's feelings of persecution were simply paranoid delusions. The doctor's conclusion: no, he was perfectly sane and rational. As the Ombudsman later reported publicly, the doctor also found it ‘extraordinary' that no one at the AFP had not told Tim the true purpose of the consultation.
When he came to us, Constable Tim was in obvious distress – with good reason. Was he, as one AFP employee later suggested to us, being ‘bricked up as a nutter'? Surely not, I thought; such a thing could not happen in modern-day Australia. But later that night, as I moped hungry and tired in a building whose air-conditioning had gone off some hours before, I noticed a letter in the investigators' ‘out' tray. It was to a consultant forensic psychiatrist in Sydney, asking for an opinion on Tim's state of mind. We later established that the letter was sent with tapes and transcripts of interviews. There was no plan for this doctor to actually meet Tim in person.
At the time, I simply turned to my AFP host, a burly but fatherly plain-clothes federal agent, and asked: ‘I see you've written to Dr So-and-so; what's that about?'
‘Oh, we're a bit worried about Tim. We think he needs some support to help manage this thing. This doctor's very good, we think he can help Tim with some stress management strategies and counselling.'
The interviews were finished, but instead of going home, I went back to my office and wrote up a detailed file-note of what the agent had said. As it turned out, it was a long way from the truth. As the Ombudsman reported, in the end ‘no adequate explanation was given' for why the investigators felt it necessary to seek this second psychiatric opinion. Especially given the results of the first, and as there was no plan for Tim to ever meet the man supposedly enlisted to ‘help' him.
The consultant was actually a ‘profiler', a specialist in diagnosing the mental state of people he never met, usually criminal suspects and besieged hostage-takers. Another AFP investigator admitted they were really just seeking a professional opinion on the veracity of Tim's evidence about being harassed. Under the pressure of stress, perhaps he was making it all up – the mystery harassing phone calls in the middle of the night; the dog faeces in his locker; the fellow officers who refused to work with him on the basis they no longer trusted him. There was no effort to help Tim. Instead, as the Ombudsman reported, it appeared the AFP investigators were simply ‘shopping around' for psychiatric opinions until they obtained one that excused them from completing an investigation on its merits.
The Ombudsman's office oversaw the rest of the investigation. The attempt to get further psychiatric opinions was terminated. There was, in fact, no reason to disbelieve Tim, and every reason to conclude that he had not been adequately supported and had indeed suffered harassment. It was fortunate he came to us when he did, and that, by luck more than design, we were able to intervene at a point where it was possible to save his career. Because it was one thing that a few fellow police had started turning against Constable Tim, aligning themselves with the officers who had been disciplined or sacked for misconduct – that kind of adverse workplace reaction can be anticipated and managed. The real damage started when the police managers responsible for his welfare, and for the good functioning of the force generally, failed to anticipate this behaviour. It got worse when they failed to stomp on it, instead throwing up their hands and letting the workplace be paralysed by conflict.
The damage got worst of all, however, when the internal investigators faced the task of recognising the evidence that the police managers had dropped the ball. Instead of facing up however, the investigators took the easy way out and were positioning to discredit the poor suffering whistleblower. Tagging Tim as ‘paranoid' and ‘delusional' would have meant the end of his career; he would have been a sad case of collateral damage. As a messenger he had been heard, and even congratulated for revealing real wrongdoing. But as in many organisations, this was still not sufficient to prevent him from becoming the messenger who almost got shot.
CONSTABLE TIM'S LUCKY ESCAPE WAS ALSO LUCKY for the Australian Federal Police, which learned a great deal from his case. As in many organisations, there was a battle going on. Welfare professionals and senior managers in the organisation, simultaneously trying to support him, were horrified at the actions of those who almost succeeded in ending his career. In the final wash-up, a number of heads rolled. But the case proved it did not have to be that way. The AFP went on to develop and introduce its own, unique strategy for monitoring and managing the welfare of officers who speak up about possible wrongdoing, and began preventing further such disasters.
A decade later, over $1 million in Australian Research Council and integrity agency funding has been spent researching how scores of federal, state and local government agencies manage these types of ‘whistleblowing' incidents – what happens when insiders try to report things that are going wrong within their own organisation. In September 2008, the first report from the Whistling While They Work project was launched by the Special Minister of State, Senator John Faulkner.
While individual organisations are not named in the research, the AFP is among those studied. Effective management of public interest whistleblowing remains a complex problem, even for agencies which make an effort – whistleblowing is only one way of flushing out wrongdoing, and it only takes one major mistake to send the message that it is not safe for staff to speak up. But the evidence shows that not all whistleblowing has to end in trauma. Indeed by 2006, when the data was collected, the AFP had become one of the best agencies in the country at managing this difficult job.
The big problem for Australian governments is that recognition of the importance of public-interest whistleblowing – and of the need for systems to manage the welfare of public officials who speak up – is still left too much to chance. Everyone knows how important whistleblowing can be. Employees are usually best placed to accurately identify when things are going wrong, in any organisation. When there is fraud, corruption, mismanagement or failures in administration, it is widely recognised that it is a public servant's duty and responsibility to speak up.
On the other hand, whistleblowing is also fraught with risks and conflicts. It is easily confused with disgruntled employees simply having a grizzle – something few managers want to encourage. But we know from experience it is often much more than that.