When Matt Comyn, now chief executive of the Commonwealth Bank, was a slightly more junior bank executive, he had qualms and scruples about the bank’s shameful practice of selling virtually useless personal loan insurance to its customers. His then boss, Ian Narev told him to “temper your sense of justice.”
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Mr Comyn, the successor and protégé of Narev, apparently followed this advice. It wasn’t until about 10 months ago, after it was clear that the banking royal commission was on to these rorts, that the bank stopped the practice. That was about a month before Comyn took over.
Comyn, and Commonwealth Bank chairman, Catherine Livingstone, have blamed Narev for any ethical lacuna in how the bank did business up until the royal commission was called, unwillingly, by the then treasurer, now Prime Minister, Scott Morrison.
Morrison’s view was that any such inquiry was entirely unnecessary. First, there was not much skulduggery going on, second, he and the treasury had put in place tough cops on the block to stop it ever happening, and anyway, chaps like Ian Narev and other senior bankers were splendid citizens unlikely ever to do the wrong thing. Heavens the banks were Liberal Party donors.
The government’s absolute conviction on the last point might be demonstrated by the way that when it sought advice on reform of the Australian financial system, it went straight to another former managing director of the Commonwealth Bank, David Murray. Perhaps not coincidentally one of Australia’s better known climate sceptics he is also noted for his belief that company directors have no responsibility to the public and the public interest, other than in obeying the law, and that their sole responsibility was to their shareholders.
Anyone who has followed the history of the Commonwealth Bank since its privatisation in 1991, and of its latter day embarrassments over a pattern of putting profit and bonuses before customers and simple decency, would know that the bank still bears the DNA of David Murray.
How odd it was, but perhaps how typical of banking best practice that David Murray was the man to whom the AMP turned when it became clear that their cultural problems were nearly as bad as the Commonwealth Bank’s, and that their board and senior managers had to go.
David Murray, no doubt, is finding out now at least, that restoring shareholder value, if it can be done, involves hard work on a culture destroyed by relentless greed, a focus on profit and shareholder interest at the expense of good citizenship, honest dealings with employees, customers, public interest regulators and the public.
Reputation is everything, as we were reminded in the week before Christmas, when Andrew Broad’s text condemning Barnaby Joyce was retweeted. Once lost it is hard to recover.
(I do not know if there is another nation like Australia where the drawing of bills of indictment against busted public figures needs only to draw on their own earlier hypocritical comments about others, or about the standards they proclaim they follow. Particularly with sex scandals. I have written before how in Australian public life and politics, the cardinal and abiding sin is hypocrisy. In the US, the appetite for sex scandal is primarily a prurient puritan one; in Britain, a sense of the ridiculous.)
A good many critics of the modern public service are very fearful that its original guiding principles have been diluted by the modern culture of responsiveness, that governments are being deprived of the benefits of frank and fearless advice, and notions of public stewardship. This is not merely a fear that advice to ministers is being tempered. In some bureaucratic hierarchies opinions differing from the secretary are not welcome. All must sing from the same song-sheet and departments are remade with clones of the secretary. Taking concerns to the public, or to custodians of the public interest, is the ultimate sin.
The public administration was not intended merely as an instrument for mindlessly carrying out the will of the government. It was supposed to be a repository of experience, independent views, not only an academy of ideas, but one which nurtures and develops alternative ways of looking at things, people willing to advance alternative approaches, and people able and willing to inject more than technical advice into policy and program discussion, but also morality, common sense and a feeling for the temper of the community.
But if the public service is tarnished, and not in conspicuously good hands, its reputation still stands higher than that of the major banks, the financial advice industry, insurance and the private sector superannuation funds the banks fostered.
There have been so many scandals, and so much political tumult this year, that it might seem churlish to put banking culture, and the clear and present risk of its infusion into the public service in pride of place.
The conjunction of these risks does not only come from the fact that the public service review is largely comprised of an array of old mates of Malcolm Turnbull. Most of them, except the noble Glyn Davis, happen to have, like Turnbull, strong backgrounds in banking, and in making very large sums of money from their participation in it.
Most, like Turnbull, share a tendency to think that it is from the private sector that government will learn most of what it needs to know about better outcomes for the public, the best advice about what to do, and structures that are efficient and effective.
It might be the other way around. The public administration has been changing, including by adapting and adopting some things from the private sector, particularly over the period 1983-2000. It is not so clear that private industry has learnt much, or much good, over the past 40 years.
So far as the public sector was concerned, the past 20 years have also involved some regress, but the general direction was forward. There were high spots but many many low ones, not least in leadership, in addiction to meaningless managerial slogans, and the willingness of officials to bend with the wind.
But if we can all sneer, and jeer, at the bankers who thought that moral considerations, or sense of justice should not temper pursuit of profit and personal bonuses, can we be certain that the public administration is an altogether more robust organisation? Can we be sure that no official – certainly of senior executive service level or above – would temper her sense of justice for impure motives? And, when scruples cannot be overcome or “tempered”, do they resign or otherwise bring matters to a head?
We are somewhat familiar with a few brave medical professionals who have spoken out about the conscious brutality and medical neglect in our overseas concentration camps, as required by government and enforced with extra added venom by officials in the department of home affairs.
But if there are dissidents with the computerised pauperisation of welfare recipients, on the innocent until proven guilty principle, the steady decline of quantity and quality of service in indigenous affairs, or the comprehensive rorting of schemes in which National Party ministers have been involved, it seems to have mostly passed without anybody much noticing.
The British Committee for Standards in Public Life reports regularly to government and parliament about issues affecting standards of conduct by politicians, public servants and others involved in the provision of services, including, in a very recent report, efforts to require an ethical framework when private sector bodies provide outsourced public services.
The committee’s charter is based on the so-called Nolan principles – similar to, if better phrased, and with better mechanisms of enforcement than, the APS code of conduct.
The seven principles are selflessness (holders of public office should act solely in terms of the public interest); integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty (including truthfulness) and leadership (the charming idea, like all the others an outrage to National Party practice, that holders of public office should exhibit these principles in their own behaviour.)
Like an overwhelming proportion of the population, here and in Britain, the committee thinks that firms and non-government organisations who provide public services under contract should be subject to the same rules as public officials and government departments. That includes being subject to the FOI Act, having accountable customer complaint systems, and having the ethical rules in the contract documents. Perhaps even with “living wills” by which the contractors agree what will happen if there is non-compliance. Britain, like Australia, has privatised jails and concentration camps, as well as much work once done directly by government agencies.
In Britain, as here, central agencies, and major agencies letting out enormous contracts pay only lip service to such notions. But they pretend otherwise in the screeds they put out praising themselves for their actions.
Here, as there, the record is very patchy, and many contracts do not even refer to ethical principles, let alone show that government and businesses have common concepts of what is expected from a “customer” rights point of view. Wheezes like claiming national security, or commercial-in-confidence and “respect for personal privacy” are also used to evade transparency and accountability.
After four years of pretend implementation, the British committee has identified three ethical “tensions” that affect the public-private “interface”.
The first is a potential conflict between the selfless principle and corporate obligations – perhaps the David Murray idea of a board’s holding profit as the sole consideration. This led some providers to create an artificial distinction among the applicability of the principles to them, and even to become dismissive of the seven principles altogether, or to adopt a “pick and mix’ approach, which, the committee said, is not in the public interest.
As some observers of bank, or public service behaviour here might feel, the British committee wonders how the many “professionals” in such bodies adhere to their professional bodies’ ethical standards and codes of conduct. And it’s not just accountants. It’s lawyers, doctors, social workers, any group claiming (and getting) professional status in their jobs.
One such British body, representing auditors, expressed concern that auditors and financial professionals managing tender processes were not considering ethical standards in conducting due diligence, framing contracts, establishing pricing and setting contractual terms. The same body also referred to wider concerns that “value for money” had come to mean pricing alone, or a race to the bottom.
Heaven forfend that there could be similar problems in Australia, whether at the Commonwealth level, or, perhaps, with ACT government relationships with the private sector.
But the big nagging question, as alive in Australia as in Britain, and as alive in the public service as in banking involves the question of “moral courage.”
That’s the Narev-Comyn problem about not tempering one’s sense of justice. Or not having the courage to speak up.
The committee cited a British survey of 28,000 folk in the bank industry which suggested that it too had no shortage of Narevs and Comyns. A third of respondents feared negative consequences for them if they raised concerns of an ethical nature. 18 per cent reported seeing senior managers turning a blind eye to inappropriate behaviour. 13 per cent thought it difficult to get ahead in their careers without “being flexible with their ethical standards”. Two per cent said they saw instances where unethical behaviour was rewarded.
Our surveys of bank culture in Australia – and the 2018 hearings of the bank inquiry – show that, if anything, the problem is far worse here. But now we know that, as do Scott Morrison, Malcolm Turnbull and Josh Frydenberg, as well as the light-touch regulation folk in the financial regulatory agencies.
But anyone who has read recent reports on the state of the APS knows that significant – sometimes higher – proportions of public servants see the same ethical shortcomings among their public service peers and superiors. It’s one of the many reasons why most public servants, like most Australians, favour anti-corruption bodies with teeth. But, as in Britain, we do not see a lot of moral courage from our public service lawyers, accountants, engineers and other professionals, even, in certain respects police and intelligence officials.
Where’s the public sector moral courage here? Where’s the leadership? Who’s making it an agenda item in their pep talks to public servants, even public service leaders. Where’s the sense of urgency?
Perhaps we should all feel relieved that the question of ethical fit figures only indirectly in the terms of reference of the bankers’ panel on adapting the public service to a new age. Even in a vacuum that industry has little to contribute.
Jack Waterford is a former editor of The Canberra Times. jwaterfordcanberra@gmail.com
