In the small, closeted world of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s (ACCC) Canberra headquarters, almost everyone knows the identity of Whistleblower #1.
He was the one who was marched out of the commission’s head office in November last year, never to return, his career up in flames. It was four days after internal emails potentially embarrassing to the ACCC had been published in a 60 Minutes investigation into Australia’s Takata air bag safety recall.
“It was the brutality of it, the suddenness of it,“ recalls Whistleblower #1. “It seems to have been done deliberately to humiliate me as a warning to others about what happens to whistleblowers. It was effective because there was shock and horror on people’s faces, as there would be.”
Whistleblower #1’s identity is barely known in the wider world and he would like to keep it that way, for the time being at least, as he attempts to bring some normality back into his life, having just started a new job and moved cities. Yet WB1 (as we will call him) remains driven to draw the spotlight onto what he believes are serious failings in Australia’s most powerful consumer safety body. It is why, after enduring a year which might have broken others, WB1 wants to get his message out.
“What more can they do to me?” he asks. “They’ve already got rid of me. They can’t do it twice.”
The end for WB1 finally came after a torturously slow 12 month investigation which concluded he had likely passed on an internal email, a breach of the Australian Public Service code of conduct. Although WB1 remained on full pay throughout the investigation, money was the least of his problems.
Whistleblowing, he says, is “not for the faint hearted”. “You need a strong motivation obviously. In my particular case I felt it was an absolute last resort and that really I had no option and I was feeling that lives were going to be lost — they already had been — and I felt it was in the public interest for those victims, the families of those victims whose lives had been lost.”
While employers look for ways to imbue their staff with a sense of purpose, WB1 arrived at the ACCC brimming with it. Formerly a school teacher, he had made a career shift to consumer safety, first in private enterprise and then for the commission, which had the remit to use its strong powers via the Australian Consumer Law to protect consumers from dangerous products.
He knew what he wanted to achieve professionally and working at the ACCC was it. At the time WB1 was recruited almost 10 years ago, he says, the ACCC appeared to be looking for people like him with retail experience who genuinely cared about consumer safety.
“At that time we were told to use the law in innovative ways and we succeeded in doing that in quite remarkable ways,” he tells Inq. “I sprang out of bed in the morning, I don’t mind saying, and really looked forward to doing that sort of work.”
But WB1 found that his mission of protecting the consumer from injury or death became harder and harder to achieve. ACCC figures show that after the Coalition came to power there was a steep fall in the number of recalls of dangerous products where the ACCC took the lead. In 2013/14 the ACCC led the negotiation of 91 recalls. That plummeted to 21 the following year. Whether it was a direction from the government to use a lighter touch on industry regulation, or whether this was due to a change in the ACCC’s management, as WB1 believes, there was a fundamental cultural shift.
At the same time, he says, internal discussion was progressively shut down. “It actually became quite risky at that point to raise issues. People started to clam up. And I think this is actually what created the environment that was ripe for whistleblowing,” he reflects.
WB1 went from feeling frustrated to feeling alarmed. “By the time you’ve reached this turning point I had a feeling of dread that more lives were going to be very adversely affected.”
WB1 was not alone. Inq is aware of two others who grew so concerned about the changing culture that they took the route of making a Public Interest Disclosure — a way of blowing the whistle internally and having allegations investigated by an independent investigator. One of these public servants (let’s call him WB2) — cited the ACCC’s handling of the Takata airbag safety recall as an example of a flawed process. He did this half a year before two separate Takata incidents in 2017 that severely injured a young woman in Darwin and killed Sydney man Huy Neng Ngo.
WB2 says there was plenty of talk at executive level about the Takata airbag, but it appeared to him that officials were trying to find reasons not to get involved. “The culture had become one of if we don’t look for a problem, then we don’t have to deal with the consequences,” he tells Inq.
WB1 saw little or no change at the ACCC after his colleagues decided to blow the whistle the government-sanctioned way. He speaks about one product, decorative ethanol burners, which left several children disfigured by burns before the ACCC acted. “I’ve seen some horrific injuries, horrible burn injuries that young children had suffered, like 55% burns to their bodies, this sort of thing and yet another systemic problem with a consumer good that wasn’t being addressed. State and territory offices of Fair Trading were repeatedly raising this issue about dangerous ethanol burners and nothing would be done.”
He says his sense of “dread” only increased when he saw that the Takata airbag had taken someone’s life after his colleague had warned of the risk to the public of how the ACCC was performing.
“That’s really what prompted me to take the ultimate step, to take that information to somebody who could effect change.”
Did he think carefully before taking his information public?
“Yes. Long and hard, and I spent many sleepless nights thinking about this, as I had about consumers, you know kids and other vulnerable consumers that had innocently and needlessly been injured in the most horrific ways imaginable. And I think at that point I felt that if I didn’t do my bit, as it were, to ensure that more lives weren’t lost I would be failing myself and other people. Actually it really came to that point where I didn’t feel that I had a choice.”
After the 60 Minutes segment aired, the hunt for the whistleblower began in earnest. WB1 was probably already on the list, having previously sided with WB2. You could say the “X” was already on his back before the evidence was gathered which would justify him being fingered for the leak and marched out of the building.
WB1 found himself immediately isolated from colleagues — his tribe — after his workmates were told not to speak to him. The isolation hurt and demoralised him. Then came the smears. “They have shown they have absolutely no qualms about telling lies about me, demonstrable lies, documented lies that are easily proven false,” he says.
But the toughest stage came when the ACCC threatened to charge him under the Crimes Act, a development he didn’t anticipate and which might have meant time in prison.
WB1 says the case of Richard Boyle, the Tax Office whistleblower who faces a potential 161 years in prison after being charged under the Crimes Act, came to mind “a few times”.
“I can completely relate to Richard Boyle when he says it felt like they wanted me dead. I felt that sometimes.”
He also watched with alarm as the federal police raided the ABC and the home of a News Corp journalist, along with the homes and offices of public servants.
“You’re never going to face any more formidable opponent in life than the government. They have incredible legal powers and unlimited funding, for pursuing you, for persecuting you. And they basically make the rules. They can make you feel absolutely isolated and powerless. And you realise those truths you took to be sacred in some way mean nothing actually. That’s when those thoughts override your rational mind.”
WB1 now hopes a NSW Coroner’s inquest into the 2017 death of Huy Neng Ngo will reveal the truth of how the Takata safety recall was handled and vindicate WB1’s actions as a whistleblower “so that the truth will ultimately come out for the victims.”
That, he says, is “why I did it.”
Tomorrow: “Sometimes you just have to be able to live with yourself…”
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”
This quotation has been attributed to a number of people, but whatever its providence it is as true today as when it was first quoted.
I would like to pass on my thanks to WB1 and whilst I’m not surprised at his fate, I feel great sympathy for him.
As Chris Hedges has stated all insitutions are inherently demonic. He was paraphrasing Paul Tillich:
Christian Faith and Social Action: A Symposium
John A. Hutchison
Scribner, 1953
[this book contains Tillich’s essay]
The Person in a Technical Society
PAUL TILLICH
p 137
” VII. CONFORMITY VERSUS MAN
…Western technical society has produced methods of adjusting persons
to its demands in production and consumption which are less brutal,
but in the long run, more effective than totalitarian suppression.
They depersonalize not by commanding but by providing, providing,
namely, what makes individual creativity superfluous. If one looks
around at the methods which produce conformity one is astonished that
still enough individual creativity is left even to produce these
refined methods. One discovers that man’s spiritual life has a
tremendous power of resistance against a reduction to prescribed
patterns of behavior. But one also sees that this resistance is in a
great danger of being worn down by the ways in which adjustment is
forced upon him in the industrial society. It starts with the
education of “adjustment” which produces conformity just by allowing
for more spontaneity of the child than any pre-industrial
civilization.
…throughout his whole life, other powerful means of adjustment are
working upon the person in the technical society; the newspapers which
choose the facts worth reporting and suggest their interpretation, the
radio programs which eliminate non-conformist contents and
interpreters, television which replaces the visual imagination by
selected pictorial presentations, the movie which for commercial and
censorship reasons has to maintain in most of its productions a
conscious mediocrity, adjusting itself to the adjusted taste of the
masses, the patterns of advertisement which permeate all other means
of public communication, and have an inescapable omnipresence.
…The technical development is irreversible and adjustment is
necessary in every society, especially in a mass society. The person
as a person can preserve himself only by a partial nonparticipation in
the objectifying structures of technical society. But he can withdraw
even partially only if he has a place to which to withdraw.
…It is the task of the Church, especially of its theology, to
describe the place of withdrawal, mainly the “religious reservation.”
It is the task of active groups within and on the boundary line of the
Church to show the possibilities of attack, to participate in it
wherever it is made and to be ready to lead it if necessary.
…Christian action must find a way to save the person in the industrial society. ”
The ACCC will only look after the ordinary person if it is led by someone who sees that as the principal and overriding objective of the organisation. It has to be someone who cares about justice for the individual, not justice for corporations. Rod Sims the person leading the ACCC has demonstrated that his priorities are keeping the corporates happy at the expense of the ordinary person. Given his background as a career public servant this comes as no surprise.
Unlike Tillich I don’t think that there is much chance of “Christian action” changing the priorities of the elites given the behavior of the large churches over the past forty years. ALL people will have to step up and resist the Corporate coup d’etat that has taken over all of Australia’s public institutions including the ACCC.
Over the last few weeks there is an underlying exposed in Crikey and as previously observed the common findings of all recent Royal Commissions is that the regulators are not competent or in default of their statutory duties. There is a compelling case to add a Royal Commission to look into the regulators.
The raft of regulators merely play musical chairs for example , if there is a data leak of information from Federal Police – they report it to the Office of Information Commission who reports it to Privacy Commission who then requests the Federal Police investigate the leak.
Let’s go for the common denominator here and have a royal commission into this rotten Coalition government.
After Tim Costello, I and others got the brusheroo from the ACCC following a complaint over pokies design I penned the following verse. (By way of explanation at the time the ACCC was investigating whether enough wool was being put into quilts.)
Australia’s Watchdog (the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission)
Young Billy went to school today with holes all through his jeans,
His parents’ money has been stripped by crooked slot machines.
The teacher will go mad at him; he hasn’t any books,
His classmates do not talk to him and give him funny looks.
Can Billy find a saviour, to free him from this bog?
Can Billy put his faith in – Australia’s wonder dog?
Young Billy will go hungry; the dog is up the track,
It left alone the little lambs and ran off with the pack,
It’s yellow and it’s mangy, bred from a line of mutts,
It’s got a hide that’s full of fleas, but not an ounce of guts.
It’s deaf and blind and toothless, and has no sense of smell,
And judging from the cloud of flies, that’s prob’ly just as well.
While gamblers sleep ‘neath bridges, rid’ with shame and guilt,
The watchdog woofs and bares its gums for wool in every quilt.
The crooked reels grind good men’s lives, the lives of women too,
The watchdog just turns tail and runs; it doesn’t want this blue.
In our great land, Australia, young Billy warrants more,
Than a shivering shape in the kennel, and a puddle on the floor.
How good is the ACCC!
But very unfortunately such contempt for the individual has become part of corporate and governmental culture. As we saw with Border Generalissimo-MP Dutton’s eagerness to strip citizenship from both those born here and naturalised immigrants at a whim, a Culture of Arrogance, Violence and Impunity has become ingrained in our managerial class.
Border Generalissimo-MP Dutton’s eagerness to close down the Manus Island concentration camp facilities to force refugees onto a violently hostile community is a good measure of how openly our decision-makers can practice an institutionalised brutality that would have embarrassed Idi Amin.
Issues of this sort simply highlight how the tolerance of contempt for the individual in one field encourages the same in other fields. We need to oppose it. After all, Border Generalissimo-MP Dutton’s (and Christian (!) Porter’s and morrison’s and Tudge’s and Cash’s and … ) eagerness to apply it to us we see every day.
My darling husband, a Medical Specialist, got given the bum’s rush out of one of the well known “For Profit Healthcare” providers, because he had the temerity to stand up for patient, who on the opinion of two specialists needed urgent surgery.
The Midwife, in charge of the entire hospital, at the time, consulted another nurse with the title of Clinical Services manager, by phone, whilst the manager was on holidays, at 7.30 pm on a public holiday. Based upon the midwife’s anxiety, and without speaking to either specialist involved, the midwife cancelled the surgery and dumped (transferred) the private patient, into the public system. The patient did not see a doctor in 3 days.
The “For Profit “healthcare provider, has a couple of private/ public partnerships with the Queensland government, which allows cost shifting onto the private health funds.
He is now working in a “Not for profit” private hospital and is very happy with the staffing levels and kindness of the staff to all his patients.
Big companies institutionalize their reactionary, and maliciousness and demand obedience, even if, the person being intimidated and threatened is more qualified with a much broader understanding of ethical behavior.
What still gob smacks me, is that this :For profit healthcare provider” does not have doctors anywhere within their management team.
WB1 and Richard Boyle deserve bravery awards.