A CALL TO COURAGE AND INTEGRITY IN PUBLIC OFFICE

Written by Jim Wallace AM

Jim Wallace is the Managing Director of the Australian Christian Lobby. Jim left the Army as a Brigadier in late 2000 after a 32 year career which included command of the SAS Regt, Special Forces and the Army’s mechanised Brigade.
 
The bedraggled NSW Government has seethed with scandal in recent months.   Former minister Ian McDonald resigned amidst allegations that he misused public funds on an overseas trip.  Another former minister, John Della Bosca, resigned after revelations of an affair with a woman half his age. More recently, frontbencher, Paul McLeay bade an emotional farewell to public life after being caught using parliamentary computer resources to access pornography and gambling websites.  Meanwhile, the list goes on and the Independent Commission Against Corruption has even recommended that criminal charges be brought against former parliamentary secretary Karyn Paluzzano for falsifying employee pay forms and then misleading corruption investigators by lying about it.
 
When they first took up their seats in their respective parliaments, I doubt any of the politicians listed above ever imagined they would one day become front-page news, accused of corruption or hypocrisy. Yet they failed in their moral duty to be truthful, to the Parliament, their colleagues their constituents and in some cases, to their nearest and dearest.
 
Recently others in the higher echelons of power have not kept their commitments on key policies; making big promises that they could not, or would not deliver when the seduction of power laid her trap.
 
Prior to the recent Tasmanian State elections, Premier David Bartlett gave an unequivocal commitment that there would be no place for the Greens in any re-elected Labor government, terming any such partnership ‘a deal with the devil’. When the election delivered the predicted hung parliament, David Bartlett gave Tasmanian Greens leader Nick McKim a Cabinet position to secure power for a Labor minority government. 
 
Federal Parliament has similar examples where the attraction of power suddenly takes a higher priority than keeping election promises and with the Greens holding the balance of power it is sure to make many of Labor’s promises vulnerable. Julia Gillard has already indicated that the carbon tax she assured us wouldn’t be introduced is now part of the government’s agenda and the hung parliament has already called into question Tony Abbott’s keeping of his agreement on the arrangements for the speaker.
 
But is integrity so malleable? Should we benignly call these incidents ‘backflips’ in the same way we too often hide the reality of civilian deaths on the battlefield in the term ‘collateral damage’.
 
A dictionary definition describes integrity as ‘the quality of possessing and steadfastly adhering to high moral principles or professional standards’. It can also refer to a state of being complete or undivided, or of being sound or undamaged.
 
I am as cautious to write on this as the next person would be, as none of us is perfect, but we each have a responsibility to ourselves and our professions to develop and maintain both integrity and courage. These two qualities must be cultivated in developing character, and they are built or eroded in the numerous small, often private choices we make on a daily basis.
 
World renowned theologian and Bishop Tom Wright, in his recent book Virtue Reborn takes us back to Shakespeare’s Hamlet for a lesson in developing good habits. Hamlet’s mother has colluded with his uncle in murdering his father and is now the queen of the usurper king. The queen has failed to act honourably, ignoring conscience and virtue for her own ends. Instead, Hamlet urges, she should try to ‘assume a virtue if you have it not’ (act 3, scene 4, line 160). As Wright notes, Hamlet is saying that it is not hypocritical to assume higher standards than we might naturally posses; rather it is the way virtue comes into its own. Urging his mother to abstain from the usurper king’s bed, Hamlet says
 
Refrain tonight
And that shall lend a kind of easiness
To the next abstinence; the next more easy;
For use almost can change the stamp of nature,
And either curb the devil, or throw him out,
With wondrous potency.
(lines 165-170)
 
The basic message is that you have to make a start somewhere in developing good habits.
 
If charity begins at home, then so too does integrity. There is a tendency today to view the private and public as separate, but this is a clear fallacy.  A person’s private behaviour is very indicative of how we can expect them to carry themselves and act in public life. Private decisions and behaviour are not trivial issues on the sidelines of a glittering political career. Our families have greater claims on our loyalty, trustworthiness and right behaviour than anyone else and the trust we honour or betray there speaks volumes about our personal integrity. 

Failure here is also the Achilles heel for our potential effectiveness in public life.  Unless we not only deliberately build our integrity, but protect it by keeping strict protocols on issues like consumption of alcohol, avoiding potentially compromising situations and above all having accountability, we are very likely to see our career crash around us as we have seen happen all too often and in plague proportions, in the New South Wales parliament.
 
This might seem to demand a disproportionate emphasis on this thing called integrity, but we are rightly demanding in our public office holders an extraordinary level of it.  It is the level of integrity demonstrated by John Simpson at Gallipoli, who so honoured his responsibility as a stretcher bearer and the onus that placed on him to put the welfare of the casualties he tended before himself, that for twenty four days he continually exposed himself to enemy fire retrieving wounded men until the inevitable burst of machine gun fire ended his life.
 
This level of professional integrity is not only a tribute to Simpson as an individual, but to the culture and leadership of the 1st AIF which undoubtedly helped cultivate it in him.
 
Still today, the Army, is known for the high value it places on leadership and its exacting standards of personal discipline. Rigorous training builds physical and mental fitness and develops team spirit. Trust is vital as life may depend on it. Strong leaders in a disciplined chain of command both inspire honourable behaviour by their personal example and by their intolerance of its absence. The ‘high moral principles and professional standards’ mentioned in our dictionary definition of integrity are, along with courage, demonstrated, expected and encouraged in the ordinary phases of military life, which then build the capacity for heroism in the field.
 
Legend has it that Simpson was recommended for a Victoria Cross for his courage. Integrity and courage are closely related.
 
Our most recent Victoria Cross was awarded to Trooper Mark Donaldson for his courageous actions in Afghanistan in September 2008. After a series of heroic acts during an ambush of his patrol, he had returned under fire to pick up a wounded coalition force interpreter and bring him back to safety. Despite the few words needed to describe it, this was an act of supreme courage. Nobody would have criticised Donaldson for leaving the wounded interpreter to his fate and yet we honoured his bravery. As in the citations of our other Victoria Cross winners, we see that the bravery we honour is not only the physical act, but the inherent integrity in the decision that manifests the act. Integrity and courage are intrinsically linked.
 
Integrity in politics demands courage, sometimes even the courage to break ranks or maintain a controversial position for the sake of integrity. It took courage for William Wilberforce to pursue the abolition of the slave trade against powerful vested interests. It took courage for Martin Luther King to fight for racial equality even at the cost of his own life.
 
Today it takes great courage to defend the rights of the unborn or the right of a child to a father and a mother against the powerful ideological agendas that would redefine family and life; just as it requires courage to honour foreign aid in the face of a global financial crisis or in supporting the rights of refugees.
 
It is simply not good enough that we see, as we so often do in politics today, legislative outcomes determined by parties and politicians meekly submitting to public opinion instead of standing for what is right, when so often their more informed position leaves them in no doubt where truth lies.
 
Perhaps we have become too complacent about our integrity in Australia and the absolute nature of it. Australia scored an 8.7 out of 10 in the 2009 Corruption Perceptions Index, meaning we ranked 8th out of 180 countries. But Government behaviour in certain parts of the world is hardly a sound comparator. The reality is that we all share the same human nature that leaves us far from immune to the temptation to act improperly.
 
Britain has a long parliamentary tradition and historically high expectations of those in public office, yet revelations in 2009 showed that a self serving culture had developed amongst MPs.
 
The MPs’ Expenses Scandal, as it became known, demonstrated the most flagrant and widespread abuse of public trust for private benefit by MPs across the party spectrum. Some of these actions included claiming for second homes they didn’t have or need, exploiting the no receipt rule, evading tax, and claiming generous food allowances when Parliament was not sitting. Many of these actions were so blatantly absurd that those involved must have realised they were acting beyond the rules but they obviously felt able to justify their own lack of integrity on the basis of ‘everyone else is doing it’. The very people charged with maintaining the national culture had accepted a professional and private one at complete odds with what they expected of others.
 
Leadership cannot fail at any level in this way and national leadership never can.
 
Keeping pre-election commitments is one key indication of government and wider party integrity. Despite their thirst for votes, politicians should not make commitments they cannot keep. In our Tasmanian example, David Bartlett must have given some thought to the very strong probability that he would need the support of the Greens to form a functional minority government. Knowing his party would fight to stay in office, he should not have misled voters by guaranteeing never to work with the Greens.
 
Such commitments are freely entered into by the parties and placed before the electorate prior to polling day. Governments should therefore resolutely keep their commitments, whatever the cost. The ability to do this in the current political climate will be a key indicator of the integrity of the new federal government.
 
Prior to the election, Ms Gillard made some key commitments to the Christian constituency, including her decision to continue and to expand the popular school chaplaincy program, her commitment to retain the definition of marriage as being between a man and a woman, and her support for ISP-level filtering of Refused Classification material. She made it very clear that these commitments would not be traded away in negotiations with the Greens and it is good to see that she has stood by that despite their inordinate pressure.
 
Politics is a high calling, intended to deliver good government as a service to the nation. For those in it, it is an all-consuming business, a relentless pressure cooker, a world of its own, and it can be all too easy to be swept away by the adrenalin, the factionalism, and the power plays.  But it is the cauldron in which, above all else, the national character is forged through the example set by our elected leaders.
 
If positive characteristics are not modelled in society they will be lost. We all look to our politicians, both old and new, to take up this mantle, acting with integrity and courage in all matters and ensuring they don’t appear on the ever growing integrity causality list.
 
Speaking at the opening of a memorial to commemorate those who had died in the WWII North African campaign, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery said: “And let us remember when all these things are said and done, that one great fact, the greatest fact, remains supreme and unassailable.  It is this. There are in this world things that are true and things that are false; there are ways that are right and ways that are wrong; there are men good and men bad.  And on one side or the other we must take our stand, one or the other we must serve.”
 
The pressures in our world today demand that good men and women make a stand in the face of very selfish ideological and commercial agendas that have been dressed up to appear reasonable, when any honest assessment shows they are not - it takes courage and integrity to announce that the emperor has no clothes. But one side or the other we must serve.
 
I hope that those serving in the 43rd Parliament will take a moment to set themselves the highest standards of courage and integrity and to commit to protect and demonstrate it, as is so essential to the highest leadership calling in the nation, and indeed essential to Australia’s future.

This article was reproduced, with permission, from the Viewpoint magazine, the Australian Christian Lobby's public policy magazine.

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Source: Viewpoint Magazine