Page 5660 - Week 14 - Tuesday, 6 December 2011
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Selling uranium to India—I am not sure whether people disagreed with this on the basis of how much money it was going to make for Australia. I think that ethics were involved in that discussion as well. I think that we are just playing games with words if we think that ethics are not involved in what we are doing here. We have some differences and some of them are on ethical grounds.
I think the majority of the committee seemed to think that ethics in public policy could only be a very narrow thing as far as “ethics equals good administration”. I have quoted in my dissenting report from Andrew Podger, who was the public service commissioner from 2002 to 2004. He wrote:
In managing ethically, public servants are required to be impartial, to exercise procedural fairness, and to support equity in employment.
I agree with all of that. I am sure we all agree with that. I think that that is where the majority of the committee thought that ethics should stop. I guess what I would say, and I think what the bill would say, is that the word “ethics” goes further than that in terms of the moral and value questions that we deal with. But as I said earlier, I actually do not think that is the relevant question.
The majority of this report does seem to make it quite clear that the idea of choosing our investments on the basis of something other than financial return is quite acceptable. If we want to call that the XYZ investment theory, it does not really make any difference. As I said, we could call it the “socially responsible bill”, the “responsible investment bill”, the “XYZ bill”. I think it would have been much more constructive and consistent with the rest of the report if we had done that.
The idea that there can be things ethical, that things have to be either black and white, that they are ethical or unethical—we all know as a matter of principle that that is not how we believe things. We all know that this is one of the things as children we do fairly early. Is it 100 per cent right or 100 per cent wrong? Does it go tit for tat? No, it is not as simple as that.
It is possibly easiest to look at ethics from a utilitarian point of view, which some people do and I do on occasions—the greatest good for the greatest number of people. You could say that that is what we are doing in terms of how we look at tobacco sales. Tobacco is legal. It is legal to sell tobacco. It is legal to consume tobacco. This Assembly has made decisions which restrict where you can consume tobacco. We did that I think in only the last Assembly. We said that you cannot consume tobacco in enclosed cars with children in them. We did that, I believe, on utilitarian, ethical grounds. We thought that the greatest good for the community, which included those young children, was to ensure that they were not exposed to passive smoke. I think these are ethical decisions that show we care about human rights and the greatest good for the community.
Moving right along with the report, in general I agree with the recommendations. Recommendations 2 and 3 are for better reporting on our current investment practices. I would have to agree with Mr Hargreaves’s comments that better reporting is sort of in general always a good thing. It is unfortunately obvious from the reporting that we
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