A thesaurus search offers the following synonyms for the term fearless: ‘daring’, ‘heroic’, ‘audacious’, ‘bold’. One might think, therefore, that to provide frank and fearless advice, public servants need to exhibit this kind of daring and courage in the face of political pressure and toxic senior leaders.
In 2023, the APS rightly focused on restoring integrity after the exposure of some shameful failures that undermined public trust.
Throughout the year, numerous seminars and webinars were launched – usually panel discussions with senior figures offering fascinating personal ‘war stories’, together with tips, tricks and words of wisdom to everyday public servants about how to behave (or not to behave) in the face of challenges to their integrity and impartiality.
Universally, in these sessions, the core message seems to be: learn the skills, develop the character and internal fortitude so that you can ‘feel the fear and do it anyway’.
Of course, in any hierarchical organisation, ‘speaking truth to power’ is an inherently risky activity. Institutions full of flawed humans rarely live up to their stated values.
For an individual to call out lapses and tipping points when standards seem to slip does, of course, need skilful and assertive communication, and there is no doubt that individual officers can learn, sharpen, and practice these attributes.
The APS Integrity Action Plan’s emphasis on cultural change for psychologically safe teams, and legislated whistleblower protections will also help.
However, to invoke the distinction made famous by sociologist C. Wright Mills way back in 1959, the crisis of integrity in the APS is not a ‘private trouble’ to be resolved at the level of individual character. It is a ‘public issue’ – an institutional phenomenon of the milieu – to be understood and addressed systemically.
In fact, the democratic system of which the APS is a part was designed with the ambition that public servants would be able to work in a context without fear. Public servants would not need to be courageous, heroic or daring because they could rely on the institutional foundations of their position to do their job without fear.
Surely, then, the first signs that something is going wrong in the system are apparent when, providing advice to government, public servants are caused to draw deep on their courage in the face of career-ending reprisal and/or reputational damage.
The APS is but one part of a broader system, and the task of shoring up a ‘fear less’ environment for policy advice is not the APS’s alone. Other system components – political processes, media cycles, structures of civil society – all have an essential role to play.
This is tough in a global context where the challenges to institutional democracy run deep and aren’t easy to understand, and are even harder to address.
One thing is clear though – the ‘easy’ option of imploring individual public servants to do better isn’t going to cut through.
If the proverbial ‘eternal vigilance’ is the price of our democratic system, in 2024, the balance of our efforts should be directed at trying to understand what would restore and sustain a ‘fear less’ environment for the delivery of policy advice, rather than continuing the focus on equipping individual APS officers to courageously face a fearful context.
