Some readers might be tempted to disbelieve the assurances of Prime Minister Howard, Defence Secretary Ric Smith, General Cosgrove and others that none of their subordinates told them about the allegations of abuse and torture in Abu Ghraib, received as early as last October.
On the contrary, these assurances are all too believable. In the light of the “children overboard” business, and the more recent humiliation of Mick Keelty, what officer would be foolish enough to pass bad news of this kind on to his or her superiors? Far better to emulate Sergeant Schultz. This setup works brilliantly for all concerned, unless, of course, it should happen that our leaders actually need to be informed about something they would rather not hear.
John Quiggin 
I too believe these assurances.
Prime Minister Howard has made an art form of ensuring that he doesn’t hear bad news. His other pattern is to find things offensive when people ask hard questions he is unwilling to ask himself.
He avoids asking the questions which might elicit bad news and thus inform him of reality. As an example when it was suggested after the allegations of USA troops torturing prisoners in Iraq that those in Guantanamo might also be abused his only response was that he would seek assurances from the USA that the treatment of the prisoners was humane.
Howard, Hill and Downer bear quite a resemblance to the see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil monkeys.
What a quandary for staff. If they tell bad news they are in trouble and if they don’t tell bad news they are also in trouble. How fortunate that they have good contracts to make the pain more bearable.
Agreed that, the system being what it is and no mercy shown to the bearers of bad news, Howard was probably NOT informed.
However, he makes things worse for his threadbare credibility by volunteering porkies on which he has no briefings. At the time of the SIEV-X scandal, he repeated the claim that it sank in Indonesian waters. Later when that was discredited he simply walked away from questions about it.
Latham could make some headway by promising to restore the old Westminster system of accountability – that the Minister must take the fall for misleading the House even when it is unintentional. That would also involve restoring permanency and independence to Dept Heads, which might also be useful.
We have a need-not-to-know government.
In March 2002 Peter Shergold (Current head of the Department of Prime Minister & Cabinet and once an American labour historian), at that time head of DEST, declared to staff:
The key question, and it is the one on which I have been reflecting at every meeting I’ve had in the last six weeks, is whether
the Department is in a fit shape to contribute as we should to supporting the Government, particularly our Ministers, in pursuit
of public policy….
There were times in the past when public servants did not have to worry too much about such questions. They could look forward to having an effective monopoly on providing advice to the government of the day. As has been emphasised at previous all-staff meetings, this is no longer the case. We need to aspire to being the provider of choice. We need to think constantly of how we can add value to the directions of government.
The need to stand in the shoes of others is nowhere more important than in the service that we provide to our Ministers. Let me be quite clear. They are our most important clients. We serve the government of the day through them. Of course they need to receive, and will almost certainly welcome, frank and fearless advice. But robust advice will only be fully effective if a
relationship of trust has been established. To do that we have to get the day-to-day responsibilities right. And ‘right’ means
imagining that we stand in the shoes of a Minister who is participating in rigorous political and public debate, facing hostile
Parliamentary questioning, contributing in an informed way to Cabinet deliberations or seeking to respond sympathetically to
the interests of constituents and citizens.
In relationship management there is one abiding truth: from little things big things grow. We need to ensure that the
correspondence drafted for Ministers captures the personal concerns that they will want to express for those who write to
them. We need to imagine, as we prepare PPQs, that we would want to use those words if we were on our feet in Parliament.
We need to ensure, above all else, that the facts we provide to our Ministers are timely, accurate and unambiguous. These are
the small matters on which we have to establish our credibility as public servants. If we do, if Ministers and their offices come
to believe in our professionalism, then playing an influential role on the big issues will be that much easier.
See entire speech:
http://www.dest.gov.au/secretaryspeech/default.htm
With these values and incentive structures ‘children overboard’ etc becomes no surprise.
I’ve noticed over the dark years of Howard’s premiership that his technique of first resort in deflecting criticism is to focus on some small aspect to the exclusion of all other considerations. To use a perhaps overstretched simile, his method could be likened to an art critic focusing entirely on some small cloud in the background to the Mona Lisa portrait. Thus if the opposition says something (an increasingly rare event I know), Howard will focus entirely on some typo on page 25. If some former Gitmo inmate says Hicks was tortured, Howard’s issue is ‘well, he’s a Taliban supporter’. If pictures of US torture are released, the issue is that no Australians were snapped participating. If he’s asked why he hasn’t done anything about a stream of reported abuses dating back over the last year, well how can he be expected to know the detail of what goes on in Russell Hill? The real issue surely is that the media go along with it – running Howard’s nano-critique while missing the glaringly obvious big picture. The script runs like this:
Issue: the emperor has no clothes
Howard: I’ve never in my life claimed to own, let alone worn, a pair of red shoes. And I find any suggestion to the contrary highly offensive and un-Australian.
Media: What’s your source for this missing red shoe claim, Mr Latham? Mr Crean said this morning it was red socks the PM wasn’t wearing. What is it, shoes or socks?
Of course Howard doesn’t want to be officially told anything that may require him to act in ways he doesn’t want to act. That’s why, despite his protestations about how ‘angry’ he is at Defence’s sham, and how the senior officials and generals have ‘accepted responsibility’, nothing whatever will happen to them. Compare this to the relentless vindictiveness he routinely shows in cutting anyone who crosses him out of any future government appointments.
On reflection, the best metaphor for the Howard regime is Enron, where it seems the board never knew anything – but that didn’t stop them collecting megabucks in fees, bonuses and stock options.
No news here
As always with the Howardians, there are two stories. The first one is what should the government have done about the prisoner abuse in Iraq when, which is a story I’ll leave to others who know about such things (meanwhile,…
No news here
As always with the Howardians, there are two stories. The first one is what should the government have done about the prisoner abuse in Iraq when, which is a story I’ll leave to others who know about such things (meanwhile,…
No news here
As always with the Howardians, there are two stories. The first one is about what the government should have done about the Iraq prisoner abuse when, which is a story I’ll leave to others who know about such things (meanwhile,…