Table of Contents
As set out in the first chapter, until now, there has been little comprehensive research to establish the overall frequency or importance of whistleblowing in the Australian public sector. Based on anecdotal accounts, even though cases of public whistleblowing can occasionally gain significant media prominence, the fact is that these cases—taken alone—suggest that whistleblowing is relatively rare. At most, Australian federal, state and local governments might each experience a few such cases each year, with occasional outbreaks of additional cases in the event of a major crisis or inquiry. Given that Australian governments employ approximately 1.66 million people (ABS 2007), this low incidence might also suggest that even if it is necessary to have legislation and procedures for managing whistleblowing, it is only in relatively rare or irregular cases that these will need to be used.
If really as low as this, the incidence of whistleblowing would provide little justification for governments or senior public sector managers to think ‘proactively’ about how to manage whistleblowing cases. Instead, such an apparently low incidence could suggest that managers need only ever know how to react to such cases if or when they happen, or when they become problematic. It also supports the assumption that whistleblowing spells ‘trouble’ for an organisation and that, consequently, even when they are correct about what they have observed, whistleblowers are typically still primarily ‘troublemakers’. Public discussion about the adverse outcomes suffered by some whistleblowers contributes to assumptions that even if wrongdoing is widespread, few employees will be reckless enough to blow the whistle on it. In some of the limited representative research conducted before this study, 71 per cent of a sample of 800 NSW public sector respondents agreed that ‘a lot of people who know about corruption don’t report it’ (Zipparo 1999b:87). This all becomes the subject of mutually reinforcing stereotypes. Those who blow the whistle are easily presumed to be relatively abnormal—either simply acting out personal grievances or irrevocably predisposed to fall into conflict with the organisation. If this is the case, it might be logical for the typical public sector manager to assume that little can ever be done to protect whistleblowers, even when they might deserve it.
In fact, none of these common assumptions about the incidence of whistleblowing is correct. This chapter seeks to break the vicious circle created by these stereotypes by filling a major gap in our knowledge about how much whistleblowing occurs and how it is regarded in public sector organisations. It presents basic data from all the project surveys, but especially the employee survey. The first part of the chapter reviews the data indicating how many respondents observed wrongdoing in the two years before the survey and how many went on to report the most serious wrongdoing they observed. At least 61 per cent of respondents indicated that they observed serious wrongdoing, with 28 per cent of respondents indicating that they reported the wrongdoing they observed. The second part of the chapter refines these results to arrive at an estimate of how much of this reporting activity can be categorised accurately as ‘whistleblowing’. The analysis includes discussion of the types of wrongdoing observed and reported and the different organisational roles that reporters of wrongdoing can occupy, both of which are important definitional issues that inform analyses throughout later chapters of the report. The conclusion is an estimate that perhaps 12 per cent of all respondents satisfy the approximate definition of a public interest whistleblower—a substantial figure when extrapolated to the larger public sector, and one at substantial odds with public stereotypes.
The third part of the chapter goes on to review evidence from the surveys about the significance of this whistleblowing activity. Again, contrary to many stereotypes, it becomes clear that whistleblowing plays a pivotal role in current public sector integrity systems and that its value is typically highly recognised in public sector organisations. Questions logically arise about whether all types of whistleblowing are equally highly valued and whether this level of recognition flows through to the way in which whistleblowing is managed. Nevertheless, the results confirm that few if any public sector agencies have reason to ignore the imperatives that exist to try to manage whistleblowing more productively.
The fourth part of the chapter highlights that, notwithstanding this broadly positive picture, major challenges confront many agencies. It moves beyond the broad averages provided when the results across the four jurisdictions are taken together to present data about the amount of observed wrongdoing reported by staff on an agency-by-agency basis. These results show enormous variability in the degree of success that different agencies appear to be having, in all four jurisdictions, in encouraging employees to speak up about wrongdoing they perceive or observe. The analysis uses the employee survey data to identify not only the ‘reporting rate’, but an even more significant performance measure, the ‘inaction rate’, in response to perceived wrongdoing in each agency—a measure against which the success of agency approaches will be judged further in later chapters. Some agencies could boast that less than 10 per cent of employees who observed serious wrongdoing then did nothing about it; but in at least one organisation in each jurisdiction, more than 50 per cent of staff in the same position neither reported the wrongdoing nor took any other action. These indicators of the varying ‘reporting climates’ in different agencies reinforce that general barriers to reporting exist across the public sector and suggest that differences in approaches and management culture can have strong, measurable effects at the agency level.