Some Reflections on Honesty in Politics
William Maley
Jesuit Seminar Series 2005
Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture, Barton, Canberra
28 February 2004
Shortly before the 2004 election, a stellar cast of distinguished
Australians came together to express concern about standards of
honesty in public life. Their intervention had no apparent impact
on the poll, and won them little favour: they were even denounced
as ‘Doddering Daquairi Diplomats’ by one of the Coalition’s
most sophisticated intellects, Ms De-Anne Kelly. Nonetheless, in
pointing to the importance of this issue, the signatories performed
a singular public service, one on which the Lenten Public Lectures
are usefully building. For if ever there was a time in which it
was important to recover a sense of the importance of honesty in
public life, it is now.
In my remarks, I want to do two things. First, I offer some general
observations about the circumstances in which honesty is morally
important and explore some of the different forms which dishonesty
can take. Second, I examine a number of cases in recent memory which
expose the need for higher standards of honesty in Australian public
life. The lesson of these remarks is a sobering one. We have reached
a sad pass where not only have standards of honesty fallen at elite
level, but the willingness of the mass public to make honesty a
criterion of where to allocate their votes has also diminished.
This sets us on a dangerous slippery slope, and it is by no means
clear where it will finally lead us.
***
There are some circumstances in which a simple demand for universal
truth-telling might lead us to moral disaster. Some years ago, I
had the benefit of a conversation with a Dutch scholar who as a
young man during the war had been involved in sheltering Jews from
the Gestapo. Of course, telling lies about who lived in the attic
was part and parcel of the requirements of the times. How ludicrous
it would be to demand that some obligation of truth applies to those
circumstances. However, it is vital to recognise just how unusual
these circumstances are. In the Gestapo case, men and women of goodwill
were confronted with circumstances of life and death where public
justice was impossible, and the foreseeable consequences of telling
the truth to the Gestapo would be devastating in human terms (see
Monroe, Barton and Klingemann, 1990). To put it another way, the
Gestapo had no right to be told the truth.
In less troubled times, circumstances dictate different responses.
Political order in liberal democracies is sustained as much by informal
understandings as by constitutional structures, and if political
leaders are not to be trusted, trouble can ensue. This is sometimes
because a mass erosion of trust spawns a legitimacy crisis, but
it can also be because untrustworthy leaders retain a significant
following, setting the scene for what scholars have called ‘delegative
democracy’ or even ‘illiberal democracy’ (Zakaria,
2003). The skepticism about government defended by scholars such
as Russell Hardin makes a lot of sense (Hardin, 1999), particularly
when the political class exploits mass fears in order to weaken
the institutional checks and balances upon which a liberal political
order depends. This was captured in a remark by the US statesman
Benjamin Franklin: those who would sacrifice essential liberties
for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Where lack of honesty is concerned, lying is often the form which
most obviously comes to mind. And the deliberate, calculated, and
selfish lie is indeed the form of dishonesty most calculated to
affront: the victim of such a lie is unlikely ever to trust the
liar again. However, there are three other forms of departure from
high standards of honesty which also deserve attention: ‘recklessness’
with the truth, the telling of ‘half-truths’, and ‘hypocrisy’.
In addition, toleration of dishonesty is itself a matter of real
concern.
Recklessness typically occurs when a claim is made without an
adequate effort to establish its veracity. The key term here is
‘adequate’. The world is far too complicated for everyone
to be involved in direct checking of every empirical claim which
they make. Ordinary people rely in the ordinary course of events
upon claims which they have reason to treat as authoritative. But
a particular responsibility falls on those who know that their claims
are likely to be widely disseminated, or to cause harm to an innocent
party if they are inaccurate. Here the excuse that a false claim
was made without malignant intent may not be a good enough defence
if it was made with reckless indifference as to whether it was true
or false.
Half-truths come in a number of shapes and sizes. At one level,
human discourse at its very best offers only a partial account of
complex realities. Our conversation is shot through with simplifications
and metaphors which are easily recognisable and only occasionally
problematic. When we speak of ‘decisions’ made by Washington,
London, and Canberra, we are using a form of shorthand, rather than
seeking consciously to mislead. However, half-truths can take a
more sinister form, where convenient truths are widely aired, and
less convenient truths are not. This is in some respects the staple
of election campaign promises where the fine-print is often obscure—but
on close scrutiny, what are often under discussion are not truths
(in the strict sense of correspondence with facts), but rather expectations
of the future (‘interest rates will remain steady’)
or even counterfactuals (‘interest rates will always be lower
under the Government than they would be if the Opposition were in
power’). Partial truths are dangerous when what is omitted
is available only through the goodwill of the agent of dissemination.
Thus, when governments quote ‘intelligence’ which supports
what they want to do, but suppress other ‘intelligence’
which points to a more complex or equivocal situation, their honesty
should come under question.
Hypocrisy, the application of different standards to situations
which should be treated similarly, is a deeply insidious form of
dishonesty. It is worth noting that hypocrisy is particularly reviled
in some non-Western political contexts: Islamic discourse, for example,
uses the term ‘hypocrites’ (munafiqun) as a most scathing
form of denunciation. Thus, when Jeane J. Kirkpatrick in a famous
Commentary article entitled ‘Dictatorship and Double Standards’
(Kirkpatrick, 1979) defended cooperative relations with authoritarian
dictatorships (such as that of the Shah of Iran) on the grounds
that ‘totalitarian’ dictatorships were worse, she found
a sympathetic audience in the United States, but attracted scorn
from Islamists who viewed the entire argument as a manifestation
of rank hypocrisy. Hypocrisy can take the form of a demand for ethical
pluralism in some circumstances, and ethical absolutism in others.
I have heard a senior Cabinet minister oppose abortion on deontological
grounds, and defend detention of asylum seekers on consequentialist
grounds, denouncing its critics on the grounds of their ‘moral
vanity’! The late Judith Shklar once observed that the ‘only
voice that damns hypocrisy to some purpose is one that laments that
the society in which we live does not live up to its declared principles,
promises and possibilities’ (Shklar, 1984: 86). Hypocrisy,
at its core, is moral dishonesty.
Toleration of dishonesty is something which should also be recognised
as a problem. Social order is produced not simply by norms which
prohibit certain forms of behaviour—for example anti-Semitic
remarks—but also by metanorms which require condemnation of
those who violate such primary norms (Axelrod, 1986). This is more
demanding than one might think, for it requires a willingness to
override other norms of social behaviour, such as requirements of
interpersonal courtesy. Sometimes it may seem easier to overlook
dishonesty, on the basis that to err is human to forgive divine,
and ordinary citizens may deserve the occasional indulgence. Political
leaders do not.
***
In the run-up to the 2001 election, Australia witnessed a depressing
slide in standards of public honesty. In what was manifestly an
attempt to exploit longstanding bigotry among Hansonites (Gibson,
McAllister and Swenson, 2002), the Howard Government, with its ‘Children
Overboard’ claims, threw caution to the winds and contaminated
public discourse with allegations which were suspect at the time,
and later shown to have been false. This occurred in three ways.
The first was the circulation of the ‘Children Overboard’
claims by the Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs
on 7 October 2001. Here what was at work was recklessness of a high
order. On the basis of scanty information about a fast-moving situation
provided by his Departmental Secretary, the Minister went straight
to the press with claims which were deeply hurtful and damaging
to those about whom they were made. Mr Ruddock not only disseminated
the incorrect claims that had been conveyed to him by the Departmental
Secretary, but added categorical statements about the motivations
of the alleged perpetrators, whose (non)-actions, he stated, were
undertaken ‘with the intention of putting us under duress’.
There is nothing to suggest that he paused for even a moment to
reflect on how reports of this sort might be contaminated by the
‘fog of war’ or distorted in the process of transmission.
Nor, more disturbingly, is there any evidence that the psychological
implausibility of what he was claiming slowed him in any way. Most
disturbingly of all, he made his claims when there was no morally
compelling reason why he should not have had them fully checked
before they were aired to the vast audience which their dissemination
at a press conference virtually guaranteed. Mr Ruddock continued
to assert his innocence of wrongdoing. In Parliament in February
2002, he claimed that ‘you do not have to tell untruths to
protect our borders. I have not told any untruths.’ (House
of Representatives Hansard, 14 February 2002, p. 192). This left
his listeners to struggle with the paradox of the untrue statement
that is not an ‘untruth’.
The second way in which discourse was contaminated was through
the failure of the Government to correct the record once the Acting
Chief of the Defence Force, Air Marshal Angus Houston, informed
Defence Minister Reith that there was no basis for the ‘Children
Overboard’ claims. Far from correcting the record, Mr Reith
provided a written statement to Major-General Roger Powell dated
20 November 2001 which stated that ‘at no stage have I received
advice that the children were not thrown overboard. There has been
no evidence presented to me, which contradicts the earlier and first
advice’. Yet we know from Air Marshal Houston’s subsequent
evidence to a parliamentary committee on 20 February 2002 that on
7 November 2001, in the presence of Brigadier Gary Bornholt, Air
Marshal Houston had advised Mr Reith that ‘fundamentally there
was nothing to suggest that women and children had been thrown into
the water’. Mr Reith might maintain that ‘advice’
means ‘written advice’, although such usage does not
accord with ordinary language, and would also imply that Mr Ruddock
first aired the ‘children overboard’ claims without
having received ‘advice’. Mr Reith might also maintain
that the advice from Air Marshal Houston was not positive advice
that children had not been thrown overboard, but merely advice that
there was no evidence that they had been. However, such an argument
is casuistical in the extreme, and in any case, it would be impossible
to maintain seriously that Air Marshal Houston’s advice did
not contradict ‘the earlier and first advice’. As I
wrote in a submission to the Senate Select Committee on a Certain
Maritime Incident, it ‘is very difficult to avoid the conclusion
that, having deceived the general public by concealing what he had
been told by the Acting Chief of the Defence Force, Mr Reith also
set out to deceive Major-General Powell through the way in which
his submission was worded.’ His submission to Major-General
Powell was a classic example of a half-truth.
The third way in which the Government contaminated public discourse
was through its refusal to apologise to the victims of the Children
Overboard slur. The closest that Minister Ruddock came to conceding
his role in the dissemination of untrue claims came in a press release
on 25 October 2002 in which he referred to ‘an apparently
incorrect report that asylum-seekers had thrown a child or children
into the ocean, originally emanating from within the military and
quickly gaining public currency’. His role in ensuring that
it quickly gained public currency was not something on which he
seemed at all interested to reflect. The Prime Minister equally
refused to utter a word of apology. Some might question whether
a refusal to apologise for false slurs is strictly dishonest. What
is incontestable, however, is its sheer meanness.
In more recent times, we have witnessed the example of untrue
claims about Iraqi possession of weapons of mass destruction being
used to justify a war. This case is in some ways more debatable
than the ‘Children Overboard’ claims. Professor Hugh
White, a respected independent commentator on defence issues (and
a trained philosopher to boot), has challenged the view that the
Prime Minister lied over the matter, pointing to advice that he
received, erroneous though it was, about Iraq’s activities.
There is, nonetheless, one respect in which in my view Mr Howard
is vulnerable to the charge against which Professor White defends
him. For in presenting his case to the public, Mr Howard did not
simply voice suspicions; he claimed knowledge. To the public, the
Prime Minister stated that ‘The Australian Government knows
that Iraq has chemical and biological weapons, and that Iraq wants
to develop nuclear weapons’ (Parliamentary Joint Committee
on ASIO, ASIS, and DSD, 2003: 90). His responsibility for precision
and candour was very high, since he was relying on classified material
to which his listeners had no access. Yet the intelligence advice
available to the Government was much more qualified, and his presentation
of intelligence advice highly selective: a report to the Australian
Parliament noted that ‘significant intelligence not covered
in the government presentations included an assessment in October
2002 that Iraq was only likely to use its WMD if the regime’s
survival was at stake and the view of the Joint Intelligence Committee
of the UK, available at the beginning of February 2003, that war
would increase the risk of terrorism and the passing of Iraq’s
WMD to terrorists’ (Parliamentary Joint Committee on ASIO,
ASIS, and DSD, 2003: 97).
I had planned to finish on this point, but I cannot forebear referring
to one even more recent episode, where a casual approach to truth
seems to have been no barrier for ascent to great heights. On 24
February, the news broke that a columnist for The Australian, Dr
Janet Albrechtsen, was to be appointed to the Board of the Australian
Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) upon the recommendation of the relevant
Minister, Senator Helen Coonan. What made this interesting was that
the appointee had been the target of a forensic exposé by
the ABC program Media Watch, and its substance is worth revisiting.
In a column in The Australian on 17 July 2002 entitled ‘Talking
race not racism’, Albrechtsen took up the very sensitive issue
of the causes of pack rape, in terms that seemed to be grounded
in scholarship: ‘Pack rape of white girls is an initiation
rite of passage for a small section of young male Muslim youths,
said Jean-Jacques Rassial, a psychotherapist at Villetaneuse University.
“Fraternal bonding now dominates. It is the law of the gang,
shorn of any sexual morals,” he said.’ She subsequently
conceded in a fax dated 6 September 2002 that she ‘did not
contact Jean-Jacques Rassial’ but claimed that what she had
written was a ‘fair’ representation of views attributed
to him in an article in The Times (Adam Sage, ‘France wrings
its hands as young run wild’, The Times, 5 December 2000).
That article, however, presented Rassial’s views in a different
way: ‘Jean-Jacques Rassial, a psychotherapist at Villetaneuse
University, said gang rape had become an initiation rite for male
adolescents in city suburbs. He said: “Fraternal bonding now
dominates. It is the law of the gang, shorn of any sexual morals”.’
In Albrechtsen’s version, ‘gang rape’ became ‘Pack
rape of white girls’ (emphasis added), and ‘male adolescents’
became ‘young male Muslim youths’ (emphasis added).
It is one thing to misrepresent an author by not quoting his views
fully; it is another thing to misrepresent an author by attributing
to him words which he has not used, especially when an effect of
such misrepresentation could be to inflame community tensions. Such
shoddiness in scholarship would disqualify the perpetrator from
receiving an academic appointment in any reputable university, and
when government then rewards the perpetrator through appointment
to a position of responsibility, one can only conclude that the
ministers involved should be sent off for remedial classes in the
‘values education’ which we are assured is so important
in our schools!
References
Axelrod, Robert (1986), ‘An Evolutionary Approach to Norms’,
American Political Science Review, vol.80, no.4, pp.1095-1111.
Gibson, Rachel, Ian McAllister, and Tami Swenson (2002) ‘The
Politics of Race and Immigration in Australia: One Nation Voting
in the 1998 Election’, Ethnic and Racial Studies,
vol.25, no.5, pp.823-44
Hardin, Russell (1999), ‘Do we want trust in government?’,
in Mark E. Warren (ed.), Democracy and Trust (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press) pp.22-41
Kirkpatrick, Jeane J. (1979), ‘Dictatorships and Double
Standards’, Commentary, vol.68, no.5, pp.34-45
Monroe, Kristin R., Michael C. Barton and Ute Klingemann (1990),
‘Altruism and the Theory of Rational Action: Rescuers of Jews
in Nazi Europe’, Ethics, vol.101, no.1, pp.103-122
Parliamentary Joint Committee on ASIO, ASIS, and DSD (2003), Intelligence
on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (Canberra: The
Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia)
Shklar, Judith N. (1984), Ordinary Vices (Cambridge MA:
Harvard University Press)
Zakaria, Fareed (2003), The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy
at Home and Abroad (New York: W.W. Norton)
William Maley AM is the Director of the Asia-Pacific College
of Diplomacy.
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