Page 1738 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 1 May 2012
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those doctors back and trawl through 10 years of medical board records. They were some of the concrete actions which Ms Gallagher and her government took at that time.
You can consider whether they were ethical, whether they were appropriate or whether they supported the intent of this paper. I will read further from this paper:
• … fostering a positive workplace culture and high standards of behaviour …
• investigating individual employment related grievances with a view to distilling systemic learnings that might be applied across the ACTPS …
• promoting high standards of public administration … including in relation to complaints handling, and provision of guidance on acceptable behaviours and standards of conduct …
We know that this is a situation that affected Ms Gallagher. She—for I think political reasons and perhaps because she had other vested interests—chose to decide that she did not want this to come to light. She took every possible action to attack those who made complaints. Eleven doctors had resigned. These were not insignificant complaints.
You can see what Ms Gallagher did. She set the standard for ethical behaviour across this government. Everybody who watched what Ms Gallagher did when that situation arose would have said: “Right. If there is a problem here and it involves a senior bureaucrat or a health administrator, whoever the individual was who was conducting the bullying, what is the government’s response? What is the minister’s response? Do they say, ‘Let’s be open about this? Let’s look at the systemic learnings. Let’s behave ethically. If I have a conflict of interest I will step aside.’?” Did all of that occur, or did the minister lead the way in attacking those that made the complaint, denying that any complaints had been made and making every effort that she possibly could to hide what occurred? We can all judge what happened there.
I think it is also true that whistleblowers have been treated very poorly. There is evidence of that, where people who have attempted to be whistleblowers under this government have been treated very shabbily.
It comes to the issue that we were discussing earlier this morning, to how we now turn our minds to how the ethical and probative framework underpinning the ACT system of government might be enhanced. If there has been a systemic breakdown or a very serious breakdown, you would think that where that has occurred the example that the ACT public service would be looking for would be one of leadership. That is what you would expect if there had been a breakdown—if a minister has had to stand aside because of a conflict of interest, if a minister has had to stand aside because it relates directly to her performance as a minister. She is the person who ultimately has been the one who has been providing misrepresented figures to the public and the federal government. You would expect her to say: “Shine a light. Shine a light on what has happened here. I would welcome an investigation.”
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