here:

Print, fill out the form and fax or email it to us

here:

OR

(Video: Watch this video on the post page)

Qantas extraordinary grounding of its entire fleet on Saturday raises some meaty ethical issues that most commentators attempt to avoid (see Michael West for example). No-one seem to want to be seen talking about ethics. Perhaps it is preferable to talk about interests because that is the “bottom line” of what motivates people to do things, anything else smacks of hypocrisy. But so much of our conversations deal with ethical issues. Newspapers have been polling the public asking if they think Mr. Joyce did the right thing. However, avoiding talking explicitly about the ethics of the matter we are left with very partial arguments that often do not get past self-interested rationalisations and spin. So for fear of hypocrisy we embrace corrosive cynicism.

Example…. Claiming “to do the right thing”, Mr Joyce remains vague about what he means by “Qantas”. It very probably does NOT mean the workers, the pilots, the engineers, the people who handle the luggage and many other services. He most probably means the shareholders, maybe extending to the decision-making circles: upper management and the board. But in the ethical realm, “doing the right thing” must extend to others affected by what the actor does. For this reason, many businesses talk about “stakeholders” not just “stockholders”. Part of stakeholder capitalism is a recognition of the importance of a “social license to operate” that may be withdrawn if the society where the business operates comes to the opinion that the business is damaging that society. The common practice of a stakeholder responsible business is to consult those who are likely to be materially affected by decisions of the business. It seems that ‘Qantas’ did not do that about the grounding of the fleet. And that lack of consultation/warning caused a lot of discomfort, inconvenience, cost and possible harm to thousands of passengers, not only those going to business meetings and holidays but also to funerals and sick relatives or are sick themselves. It is also causing wide-spread social backlash for Qantas itself. One particular stakeholder is extremely angry: the Australian Federal Government; an anger, it seems compounded by Mr Joyce afterwards claiming that he did advise Minister Albanese.

Disruption to clients has been caused by the unions, too. But there are disputes about how much is due to whom, as is the nature of such fights and the unions claim to have been very careful to limit the disruption to pasengers.

However, some people are happy. After Fair Work Australia decided to order the termination of the industrial action on both sides, Qantas shares began to rise against the trend in the Australian market.

Some, Tony Abbott among them, think that the Federal Government should have acted earlier using its powers to intervene where the dispute is affecting the nation’s economy. (See Peter Hartcher) Qantas is a big company, for some a flag-ship company with a very large share of the Australian domestic market. The Global Financial Crisis highlighted only too painfully that there are many companies now with a claim to be in the “too big to fail” basket. Being so big if not itself unethical is certainly an ethical risk: that you use your size unfairly to get what you want. It is the nature of human beings and institutions to find the temptation too much. Perhaps it is up to the rest of us to ensure that others are not put in temptation’s way! Nor does it makes sense from the point of view of the functioning of the market because it encourages anti-competitive behaviour. In the case of the big American banks, for example, the Government’s tacit recognition of their “too big to fail” status has effectively given them a license to continue the very risky behaviour that got them and the whole financial system into such a deep crisis. Most commentators agree that Mr Joyce is taking big risks and that means putting a lot of people and structures that go beyond Qantas at risk also. Society cannot bank upon a cowboy’s instincts at the roulette wheel! Those who play the stock market tend to be gamblers, however…. they do recognise the behaviour and know how those games are played.

Another series of elements which are of ethical relevance concerns the outcomes. Mr Joyce says Qantas (sic) is fighting for survival. It lost $220m on its international flights, he says, despite turning in a $552m profit last year ($249m after tax). Once again the figures are disputed. The Unions have been claiming for some time now that Qantas has been picking up some of JetStar’s tab. Once again a bit difficult to prove. So “survival” might be overstating it. On the other hand, many airlines have gone bust and Qantas hasn’t paid a dividend in two years. The airline industry is a difficult place to make reliable profits (see Warren Buffet’s famous quip), yet it needs to provide a reliable service. It is a bit of a bind, isn’t it?

Qantas’ international routes have to compete with state-owned airlines which are undercutting Qantas, probably at a loss. So what are the prospects of beating them? Qantas may have to go up against some very deep pockets indeed, especially if Etihad and Emirates are anything to go by. The only way to compete, so they say, is to cut costs, usually meaning labour. This ready-made and oft repeated solution does tend to ignore the big revolution in the skies in the last decade: aeroplane efficiency. However, cutting labour costs is another way of saying shifting the pie of Qantas’ earnings from staff to shareholders. This way of looking at the issue presumes that the workers are, unlike Mr. Joyce’s view, a part of Qantas and central stakeholders affected by management’s decisions. In corporate world, the gap between the top end of town and the rest has been growing very quickly: UK; US. In Australia, income from profits have risen by an average of about 11% pa for the last decade or so, while income from wages has risen by only 3%. The argument that this is merely the market at work is a little thin since these gaps can be shown to follow regulatory changes such as those that enabled the crisis to happen and the structure of the tax regime, and so on. If you were to vote on what would be a fair distribution of the pie, how would you think about it?

There are other approaches possible. Johnson & Johnson, many years ago, set out its its values in its “Credo”. It sets out its varied responsibilities to its stakeholders, clients first, employees also, and so on. It concludes, “When we operate according to these principles, the stockholders should realize a fair return.”  Clearly this is not the description of a high risk high return stock. But this is a description of a company that must provide a highly reliable service. This is not a cowboy company watched keenly by the punters on the stock exchange.

The problems Qantas, in the large sense of Qantas, faces are cultural and structural and both of these are of concern to ethics. While Mr Joyce, the board and the shareholders believe, (a cultural idea) that they and they alone make decisions without reference to any other stakeholder, the company, the problems will persist until, perhaps, they manage to divest Qantas of its flagship, high safety and reliability characteristics so that they might replace them with high risk, high gain ones. The vision behind this attitude seems to be that staff, particularly unionised staff are the competition. It is a vision that creates and fights many conflicts, real conflicts of interest. The structural problems related to these cultural would include those where returns to some of Qantas (upper management, even more so than stockholders!) are remunerated under incentivised calculations while the rest are considered to be costs that need to be cut.

Ethically, one might ask why those at the top seem to get carrots and those at the bottom seem to get sticks? If carrots work at the top, why wouldn’t they work all the way through? Improved efficiency and innovation are not the sole preserve of the leaders, entire teams can contribute to them. We do need structures, from an ethical point of view, that attempt to find a way forward where interests are cooperative rather than in conflict.

Profit sharing based bonuses for the staff might be a beginning. Greater transparency and reasonable argumentation, which includes considerations of fairness, about differences of pay might also help. Large, stable and reliable companies can show the way but only if they turn their backs on the gamblers’ lure of big gold.

If this model still does not work for an international airline, then perhaps commercial models will not. Certainly, it will be bad for passengers if the only viable commercial model is at the expense of the quality of service. (Anyone who has flown on a domestic US airline recently could probably tell some tales of woe.) Many other carriers have tried and failed, perhaps Emirates and Singapore do have a more practical answer.

30 August 2011

Ladies and gentlemen,

I am no expert on the philosophy of ethics and morals and I do not claim that what I say is in any way novel.

In reflecting on ethics in public life let me say what I mean by public life in this talk.

Danny Gilbert at work!

By public life I mean that vast collection of political, cultural, social and economic structures, organisations and institutions, including the workplace, which make up and which underpin cohesive societies. People who are engaged in leadership positions in those organisations and who actually influence the lives of others are to varying degrees engaged in public life.

Of course I would not just want to leave it there. Healthy societies depend on the widespread participation by citizens in public affairs and in the institutions that make up civil society. Each of us has the obligation to contribute to the building of social capital, that is to say, to the forces and influences which bind us in community spirit and concern for each other.

First I want to say that ethics in public life have to be grounded in ethics in private life.

Second, I will say something about some of the philosophical thinking on ethics and morals.

Third, I will make some very broad comments about the personal challenge of ethics.

Finally I will make some observations about our times and the challenges we face in promoting the values of truth, authenticity and value in public life.

I hope throughout this talk to convey why I think ethics are profoundly important.

Simon Longstaff from the St James Ethics Centre in Sydney says that the key to understanding the demands around the ethical life is to be found in Socrates’ claim that “the unexamined life is not worth living”. This critical examination of “what one ought to do”, is foundationally important because there is no universal agreement about what is right or wrong in every given situation. That is why we are called to live this examined life and to be actively engaged with the ethical dimensions of the choices we make every day.

Now we are not the first to think about these matters. For example, in our own cultural tradition the Greek philosophers believed that there were fundamental facts about the nature of man, principally his desire to live peaceably and well, from which ethical and moral principles could be reasoned. This philosophical approach, accompanied by Judeo-Christian explorations of faith and morality, has privileged our age with a rich legacy.

But this is not a legacy which necessarily answers the questions of today, because questions of ethics are about how we behave in given situations in today’s world and because ethical reasoning does not always produce certain answers. It is not like scientific reasoning which does produce knowledge which is both cumulative and more or less certain.

That said, today almost everyone believes that there are such things as objective values in the affairs of human beings. So much so, that there is little contest about whether or not we should strive to live ethical lives.

I am attracted to this question of ethics, beyond the good or moral life. After all, one can lead a perfectly good life and be commonly regarded as a good person, treating others as one would wish to be treated, being trustworthy and honest and so on without living a particularly ethical life in the sense of how I refer to it here. Most people, indeed the vast majority of people, live personal and private lives which are more or less informed by commonly held views about ethics and morals and where we examine what we do to some extent. It is not as if these things are outside of everyday experience. They are not and most people try to treat other people fairly well.

A view from the offices of G+T

An ethical life, on the other hand, is one where the person engages actively and rigorously with hard choices, accepts that words and actions have consequences, and makes those choices in that considered light. Such choices, as we are all painfully aware, are not just between right and wrong. They can be between two alternatives neither of which is good or desirable or right, both of which may have some bad or undesirable consequences. But no other alternatives are available. One or the other it must be. Hobson’s choice. Ethics involves the attempt – always striving, perhaps never arriving – to give to yourself a coherent framework, embedded in decency and integrity, within which to make such choices.

I would not want to baldly assert that good or moral people who do not ordinarily engage directly or substantively with these notions are in some merit-related way less “ethical” or less “moral” than those who do. Without a doubt the choices actually made by these good people in their day to day lives would almost always score well if considered from the standpoint of ordinary civil behaviour and decency.

But there is something more to it than this. The critically examined life does open up different and more reflective dimensions and is a much more demanding call than simply being moral or good.

I strongly agree with those who say that the examined conscience enlivens our capacity to think richly and imaginatively about our lives. It also enlivens our capacity to think about how we treat other people, both on a day to day basis and in relation to the more challenging position of dealing with people in need – people outside our circle of family and friends. While it is too much to expect that we will ever fully align our personal ambitions and values with our obligations to people in need, I do think that our goals should include this challenge.

Now there has to be some starting point to the ethical question of why one ought or ought not to do a particular thing or why we as a society ought or ought not to do a particular thing. There are many different answers to this question.

One that has long appealed to me is the statement by Simone Weil in her essay “The Needs of the Soul”. She saw our common humanity as the source of our responsibility to each other.

“The object of any obligation, in the realm of human affairs, is always the human being as such. There exists an obligation towards every human being for the sole reason that he or she is a human being, without any other condition requiring to being fulfilled, and even without any recognition of such obligation on the part of the individual concerned”.

The moral philosopher Emmanuel Levinas has a similar approach. He regards the face of the human “other” as the source of all moral responsibility. In other words, we are charged to live well by the mere fact of our existence as a human being. Immanuel Kant said that we cannot adequately respect our own humanity unless we respect the humanity of others. Put another way, our desire to live well is reason itself for our concern that others also have the opportunity to live well.

Have to think about this....

Of course it would hardly be possible to live a good life in the absence of a personal sense of dignity and self respect – indispensable conditions to a life well lived. To again refer to Kant – if you think you are worthy of respect yourself, you must treat the lives of others as having similar worth. And if the value you find in your own life is to be truly objective, it must be the value of humanity itself. In other words, if you believe that your life has value because you are a member of the human race and not simply because it is of value to you, then it should follow that you must value the lives and humanity of others.

For very large numbers of people in the world today, the value of humanity itself is not the foundational motivation for them to live ethical and moral lives. For these people living well means living according to the standards and behaviours set down by religion. These religious standards usually require people to treat others with dignity and respect. Indeed, many people of religious disposition would think that there is something blasphemous about the rejection of people in need. That is certainly the case with the Christian message and as I understand it, with the world’s other great religions.

However religion does not provide adequate solutions to every ethical question. Indeed, for people of strong religious conviction, religion will often trump ethics.

So I want to make the point that, in the present circumstances in which we find ourselves, a person’s adherence to a set of moral beliefs, religious or otherwise, is not a sufficient answer to the question of what constitutes an ethical life.

So what does this belief in the value of every human life, mean for people in our personal and public lives?

Everyone in society wants to live in reasonable material comfort, with sufficient income and means to live independently of others and with the capacity to make choices in order to live valuable and fulfilling lives. This is what is commonly referred to today as ‘the good life’. But as I have said, an ethical life should amount to something more. It can and should include acting and making decisions that accord with our obligations to others.

At the most basic level in the ordinariness of everyday, this means an obligation to treat others with decency. Having good manners, treating people with kindness, dealing with people openly and honestly and acting with integrity. It means making decisions of the mind which are in line with decisions of the heart. It means bringing to bear a humane consideration of others in our daily interactions.

Of course, if all is going well, all of these demands are easily met in our interactions with family and friends. It is more difficult when we are not dealing with intimates. For example, the workplace is a little more demanding. The workplace is often the place that truly tests one’s commitment to ethics.

The work community is for many people the closest it gets to participation in community life. One should always start with the principle that we treat people as an end in themselves and not as a means to an end. This reasoning informs the obligation to be open and honest with people about where they stand in the organisation and how they are progressing. It is also highly informative about how people should be paid. How much to pay one’s employee is always a difficult ethical question.

Decent behaviour is also important in how people are developed, promoted, counselled and in some cases dismissed. How one treats people on the termination of their employment is very often the ultimate test of one’s ethical commitment to an employee. At this point the relationship is ending. It is very easy to act peremptorily and tell someone to pack their bags. It is much more difficult, more time consuming and more expensive to engage in a conversation and process which is respectful of the person’s own sense of identity, integrity, and self belief.

I also think that corporations need to ask and answer the question of “what they ought to do”. We face many social, economic and environmental problems in Australia. The influence of business today is so pervasive that government on its own can no longer provide all the solutions. Business, particularly big business, does not act in a vacuum and its impact is felt in relation to many social, economic and environmental issues. The ethical challenge for business is to create a value chain beyond the interests of its shareholders and customers, and to contribute to the well-being of society at large. I am confident this can be achieved consistently with the best interests of shareholders, including making healthy profits and the return on their capital investments.

I should say something about money. Money is important. It is important that we have it. It is an important building block to a strong and healthy nation. Money helps people to have dignity and self respect.

I am not particularly concerned about the question of how much money is too much. We need to have rich people in our communities for a number of good reasons, and there needs to be opportunities for people to become rich.

But we do need to be concerned with how our individual wealth is created and what we do with it. If we create our wealth treating other people as a means to an end, then of course that is unacceptable and unethical.

As to what wealthy people should do I would make the point that they are very often people of influence. Accordingly, I think that wealthy people have responsibilities not only to assist in raising living standards and opportunities for everyone, but to contribute to the well-being of our communities and to civil society more generally.

It is not as if the wealthy have made their money on their own. The briefest examination of how an individual’s wealth has been built will reveal the contribution of many people and very often fertile social, political and economic conditions to which there have been many contributors. Being rich should make it more difficult for a person to ignore the face of the human “other”.

Of course, money can be very dangerous. It carries with it the potential to be antithetical to a life well lived even if not used in an ostentatious way. Money is highly seductive and has the tendency to be silently self congratulatory and silently self selecting of the company rich people find themselves in – mostly other rich people.

Question time

In a recent article, entitled “Secularism and the Limits of Community” the American legal philosopher Jeremy Waldron, sounded a warning to those of us who live in privileged communities:

“It is a form of community that circles the wagons to defend those who are privileged as its members against any concerns beyond the community itself that might threaten the basis of its prosperity”.

He goes on to say that small-scale privileged communities have their counterpart at the national level and we have seen evidence of this kind of thinking in the political life of Australia over the past several years. This is particularly evident in much of the national discussion about refugee boat people. If we reflected upon considerations of the kind I have been talking about, then we could as a nation come up with better and more humane ways of dealing with these, our fellow human beings in serious need.

For people with money, the ethical question of “what we ought to do” is a complex one. The Australia ethicist Peter Singer says we should all give away a minimum of 5% of our wealth and annual incomes.

I would not want to be at all prescriptive about it but I would make three points about philanthropy.

First, it must not be like welfare, that is to say like a hand-out. At its worst, welfare is destructive of personal initiative and self worth. Philanthropy must not be a disincentive for the people who benefit from it. To the contrary, philanthropy must empower and enable people to improve their lives. This is not easily achieved and realistic and sometimes hard-nosed thinking is required. In other words, a thoughtful and critical approach, weighing up the pros and cons and taking care in relation to unintended consequences.

Second, I always think it is not just about the giving of money. What is additionally important is giving of one’s own time and offering to the “other” the human face of friendship.

Third, the tone and spirit of the act of giving is profoundly meaningful. Impatient, paternalistic or patronising philanthropy is of little worth. It can be alienating and it can compound the very problem it seeks to remedy.

I also want to sound a warning about the business perspective which now informs much thinking as to how the philanthropic dollar is spent. By business perspective, I mean the very sensible idea that philanthropic investment should be made within a framework of efficiency, accountability and outcomes in the form of measurable social returns. While I am a strong supporter of this approach, I sometimes worry that the human face might be lost in the noise of the ‘business case’.

Now to politics.

Since the last election much has been said and written about the poor quality of political debate and the degrading nature of political popularism and what is commonly referred to as “short-termism”. I think the situation has reached such a low ebb that in Australia today one is left with the dispiriting conclusion that too little of what is said by those in public life is true, authentic or well considered. Surely there are ethical obligations on the part of our leaders and politicians to engage in genuine debate and to have genuine and honest agreement and disagreement. Too much of political debate is little more than spin or populist and/or opportunistic rhetoric with scant attention to the deeper issues at hand. As to spin, Noel Pearson had this to say in one of his recent articles in the Australian newspaper titled “Indigenous people taken out for a spin”:

“One of the problems with the popularisation of the word “spin” is that it has trivialised what is the deliberate and systematic misrepresentation of the truth and the promulgation of misleading interpretations of facts designed to deceive the listening and viewing public.”

Politics is part of the life-blood of a nation. Political choices have profound and lasting impacts upon the lives of individuals, groups of people large and small, business, education, health, infrastructure, the arts and so on. These matters are the bread and butter issues of political life and we are constantly barraged with debate and argument about them. However the nature of public discourse and its quality is more deeply penetrating and lasting than the mere discussion of the issue at hand at any particular moment. The quality of public discourse goes to the very nature of the society in which we live.

While the promotion of sectional interests is important, in fact very important, public and political campaigns frequently ignore the interests of the community at large. So very often, a narrow approach is taken with the mindset that to do otherwise is to invite defeat of the particular sectional interests sought to be protected or advanced. This is a regrettable “take no prisoners” approach to public discourse. Such approaches are divisive and no friend to the generous discussion of wider community interests.

Politicians and what they say and do influences and informs the nature of relationships between Australians themselves and between Australians and the rest of the world. Much damage is done when complex issues are debated with spin or political popularism at the forefront and with little serious attention given to the deeper or long term analysis or to underlying social and ethical considerations. Of course the media which plays such a vital role in public life and its often shallow reporting of both facts and opinion can be strongly criticized as well.

The risk here is that we do damage to our capacity to distinguish between and to choose between what is right and what is merely popular. Ultimately, we run the risk of doing damage to our national conscience and heart as well as to the fragile processes that allow us to discuss public matters democratically.

We also run the risk of doing damage to the trust that binds us. The absence of trust is inimical to a healthy society. We need to trust each other if we are to feel safe, if we are to feel that our interests will be more or less respected and upheld, if we are to feel that we have the opportunity to live full and successful lives and if we are to believe that those in power will act with authenticity and integrity. This element of trust is especially critical for people who do not see themselves as being included in the mainstream or enjoying life’s fruits as much as others.

It is a bad thing when people’s choices are impeded or undermined by poor political discourse. There are few black or white right answers about how the nation’s resources are best utilised. For trust to exist we need to respect each other’s views and to respect our political leaders .We need respect and trust if we are to have proper debates about how the nations resources are best used to solve the many problems we face.

I suppose we may think there is little that we can do about this. But political influence is wielded at many levels of society. Politicians do not act alone and they do not live in isolation. The wielding of that influence should not be limited to self interested motivations. “What we ought to do” here is to both participate in society and to challenge our politicians.

We should tell our politicians that these behaviours are unacceptable because they are unworthy of the type of community we should be. How often have we all heard it said of a particular politician that he or she is an excellent politician because of his or her capacity to thrive in the cut and thrust of the political process? As if that is the sole measure of success.

I do not accuse politicians of having no regard for ethics. I do accuse them of not having a deep and abiding respect for truth and authenticity in public debate.

Finally, I want to emphasise how important it is to continue to think about and promote the discussions of ethics in public life. We should be grateful to the Edmund Rice Centre for keeping these issues in front of us.

A view from the top

The point has been made many times that the greatest gift we can give to our children is to pass on to them the wisdom and knowledge which previous generations so painfully acquired. We have to remind ourselves that a healthy society cannot be the sum total of self interest and that these ideas and values cannot be taken for granted. The transmission of what is best in our culture is not automatic.

In his poem “Adam’s Curse”, W B Yeats says “that we must labour to be beautiful” and that “It’s certain there is no fine thing since Adam’s fall but needs much labouring”. And so it is with this fine thing called ethics – it needs a great deal of “the labour to be beautiful”.

My thanks to the Edmund Rice Centre for inviting me to speak on this subject, and my thanks to all of you for coming this morning and listening to me.

Danny Gilbert

The questions posed by the MPs were of two types. The first, the majority, represented attempts to find out who knew what and when and who ordered what actions. They were met largely by James Murdoch with a careful strategy of “plausible deniability”. The strategy had a number of elements:

• Constant references to the advice sought and relied upon from “senior legal counsel”, highly specialised experts in a complex discipline where James is merely a seeker and follower of advice. In this way, any questions about ethical responsibility were responded to in the context of legal responsibility, that is what could be proved in a court of law.
• A careful balancing act between ignorance of specific operational detail, of times and places, on the one hand and of asserting overall competence in guiding the more important decisions of the company on the other. In this way, James remains ignorant and therefore not responsible for the criminal and unethical decisions while at the same time attempting to avoid the accusation of incompetence.
• Entered into the discussion with a significant number of people who had resigned already providing implicit acknowledgement of guilt but for whom the Murdochs could no longer speak.
• A careful isolation of “News of the World” from the rest of the company’s activities and structure. It was about 1% of the company’s global interest. So, the implicit claim is that they had axed the rotten limb already, leaving the rest of the tree sound and thriving.

The strategy, despite the fact that the MPs probed and probed, proved largely successful. Personal responsibility could not be clearly imputed: plausible deniability was sustained, chiefly by locating the blame and responsibility on a few individuals, and one newspaper, the “bad apples” that have now been “removed”.

Rupert, at one point, made a fervent statement about the goodness and professionalism of the vast majority of the people working in the company, and that claim should not be dismissed. However, instead of allowing this claim to become part of the “plausible deniability” strategy, in which only a few bad apples are to blame, we should be asking how those good people can be party to doing bad things, in this case (as in others) very bad things. And hence the second type of question which concerned the structure and culture and business model of the organisation. Fortunately, we know a lot more about how organisations can become “bad barrels” that push otherwise good, normal people to behave like “bad apples”. Not only that, but we also know why organisations are sometimes deliberately built into bad barrels, but more of that later.

Social psychologists like Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo have studied the powerful forces of institutional and group situations that, if arranged in the “correct” constellation, can push a significant majority of ordinary people to suspend their own normal moral judgement to engage in torture of others. The experiments conducted following Milgram’s ideas are the most replicated experiments in the history of psychology. They consistently show that about 66% of normal people will engage in severe torture in specific circumstances. What does this have to do with the Murdoch companies? At first glance, “News of the World” was engaged in a sort of torture of the parents of that dead girl and of many others whose personal lives were humiliatingly flaunted in public. On another level, what Milgram and Zimbardo discovered can provide insights into how newspapers or any other organisation can push people to do bad things, not just torture, but any suspension of personal morality. Zimbardo has a sort of recipe book for creating a “bad barrel” in this sens. You can find it in this paper.

Why would any organisation do such a thing? Because it was designed to do so by those who build/maintain the organisation. Those people do it when two conditions apply:

1. They believe that the outcome they desire not only justifies any means but REQUIRES means ordinarily judged to be bad. Zimbardo’s favourite example is the belief that national security justifies anything.
2. They need to maintain “plausible deniability”; given the fact that (according to their judgement) what is needed is wrong, probably also illegal, they must ensure that no order is issued, no agreement is made that can be attributed to the direct action of the “barrel owner”, yet still ensure that the wrong doing occurs.

In other words, serious plausible deniability is NOT the fruit of quickly organising your story, it must be BUILT IN to the organisation and that takes time. The first item in Zimbardo’s recipe for a bad barrel is to start with an ideology that will justify whatever happens later: it has to look good but allow evil, essentially an effective lie. In Murdoch’s case, that ideology might be something like: “The public interest is to achieve greater transparency to ensure a better democracy. The press should investigate and publish what goes on behind closed doors because it is its particular service of the public interest.” Rupert made such a claim during the 3 hour grilling. He claimed that as a result of the efforts of News International newspapers, we have better, more democratic societies.

However, the best lies always look good, otherwise they would not be effective, they would not convince. Is there are lie here? Perhaps surprisingly, the Australian Federal Minister for Privacy, Brendan O’Connor, put his finger on it when talking recently about defending an invasion of privacy for the sake of public interest: “a public interest defence would include exposing corrupt politicians, but that public interest did not mean merely what interested the public.”  Many have made the accusation that New International papers go for “titillation” rather than authentic investigative journalism, in other words what interests the public, what we find exciting, a sort of pornography of humiliation, rather than the public interest. The Murdoch press, it can be argued, has built itself on confusing that important distinction. Murdoch press spokespeople continue to argue that they merely supply the public with what the public wants without any thought about the nature of those “wants”.

Once the lie gets going, the next element is to continue to justify it by confusing the difference between ethics and the law. The strong version of this is as described in Zimbardo when people were pushed to do ethically bad things by being convinced that they had a legal responsibility to do so. In a weaker version, they are more likely to do so when they are told, “Don’t worry, it is legal.” When Murdoch papers run stories of dubious truthfulness at best, stories which turn out to be quite false, they fall back on a defense that requires legal proof that would be difficult to provide. An example is the photos that were claimed to show Pauline Hansen posing provocatively. The photos were false, yet the paper claimed not to have known that to be a “fact” until much later. Dubious but not provable to the contrary.

Another element in Zimbardo’s recipe book for making evil barrels is for the leader to begin by being a close, compassionate just person and then by small steps become more distant and more authoritarian. (In Zimbardo’s article, he says, “Chang[ing] the nature of the influence authority from initially “Just” and reasonable to “Unjust” and demanding, even irrational, elicits initial compliance and later confusion, but continued obedience. ” (p. 5)) Robert Fisk describes why he stopped working for the Murdoch Press. At the beginning of his time working for them, he presents Rupert as well as Fisk’s immediate bosses as tolerant and fair, funny, approachable and respectful. Then, as time goes by, the political guidelines become harder, less warranted by the facts and the demands for compliance grew, the authorities in the company became more remote and intransigent.

Another element in Zimbardo’s recipe is: “Present[ing] basic rules to be followed, that seem to make sense prior to their actual use, but then can be arbitrarily used to justify mindless compliance. Make the rules vague and change them as necessary. ” (as above) Robert Fisk’s portrayal would suggest that this element was also in play. Others have also speculated that the dominating culture of New International is one where people are encouraged to do what they think their superior wants without having been told too explicitly what that is, developing a kind of auto-censorship aimed to please. (See Deborah Orr for example… ) Most rumour mills flourish around subjects like how people are rewarded and punished. When that is based on whether they did or did not please the boss, the message is quickly and effectively spread. But they can only thrive while what is required remains vague and changing.

Those who focus on the governance issues in News International (and its Australian child, News Limited) are right to do so. The most important issues go to how the organisation is run, about the carefully tailored intangibles that can move ordinary people to do extraordinarily bad things. The bigger, more important questions behind the Murdoch scandal concern not James’ and Rupert’s responsibilities in the operational details of News of the World but their actions in constructing a business organisation with the power to corrupt (relatively!) good journalists, good policemen, good politicians, good people like us. To be able to do this, we all need much better ideas and language to describe and understand how business organisations affect us as individuals; we need to accept that very few of us have many of the heroic qualities to resist, because very few of us are aware that we need them! This is more important because, at the end of the day Rupert and James will die, but the business can live on and on. Think about it.

A starting point? Just as the bad barrel begins with a twisted ideology, perhaps the way out is to “untwist” it. Transparency is important. Too important to be twisted by lies. A clear light needs to be shone on the internal workings of News International. Unfortunately it does not seem likely that the company itself will be capable of doing so. The company culture, like cultures all around the world, has strong inertia, seemingly impervious to some of the most elemental lessons from this debacle. The Sun, News International’s remaining tabloid is still at it. While Norway seems to be responding to the tragedy of bombing and massacre with measured humanity, “The Sun” splashed out with unsupported accusations that fit its “muslim terrorism everywhere” approach. See it here. So the light will have to be shone by others, but let it be shone on how the company works, not on a witch-hunt for guilty individuals.

What is needed is regulation that aims not so much at avoiding individual wrong-doing but rather bad business models and bad business organisational structures with clearer guidelines about what those are. Despite widespread cynicism, a revamped code of ethics states good ethical principles and what they mean for journalism would help. A good code would identify examples of good responses to common challenges, clear identification and critique of known bad business models. The important thing is not for it just to repeat principles but show how they can be applied. The idea is to enable everyone, every stakeholder a participant. That means that a good code should also be accompanied by proper complaints-handling mechanisms that publish complaints and the actions with which those complaints are handled. That provides clear feedback to all concerned about how ethical principles work as well as a forum for discussion about how to improve them. This could open a place in the public conversation and debate about ethics itself, not just about what the law can enforce. We all need to take some responsibility for good behaviour, publicly as well as privately, and move beyond complaining about the ethics of others.

One way to do that is to be prepared in public to say that unethical activity is unethical and you don’t wish to collaborate with it. The adverstisers which began to boycott News of the World did a fundamental human thing: they said with their feet that they will not collaborate with (some!) ethically wrong behaviour, rather than just limit themselves to what the law can and cannot do.

The Alliance of Australian Retailers represents the Service Station Association, Australian Newsagents and the National Independent Retailers Association (Alliance of Australian Retailers, “supported” (a euphemism for “funded”?) by British American Tobacco, Philip Morris and Imperial Tobacco. http://www.australianretailers.com.au/whoweare.html). The Alliance only came into existence on the 18^th January, 2011 (http://www.abr.business.gov.au/%28bkwy3555ja1wfi55amuvew55%29/search.aspx?SearchText=145+378+589&StartSearch=True)

As part of the advertising campaign a recent ad has stated that,
‘Highly organised criminal networks are reported to smuggle illegal tobacco in Australia – and it’s being smoked by children as young as 14 years old’ (Alliance of Australian Retailers, http://www.australianretailers.com.au/downloads/press2011/14_year_olds_smoking.pdf).

This claim is sourced to p.23 of a 2007 survey of perceptions and use of a range of drugs including Tobacco (AIHW, http://www.aihw.gov.au/): ‘Of Australians aged 14 years or older, one-third (33.6%) had seen or heard of unbranded loose tobacco (Table 4.2). Fewer than one in ten (8.0%) had actually smoked unbranded tobacco, which was one-quarter (25.9%) of those who were aware of it.’

The revelation that children as young as 14 are smoking illegal tobacco products is alarming but the survey talked to people from age 14 to 60+, of which less than one in ten have actually smoked illegal tobacco. The survey tells us that 14 year olds represent approximately 10% of the surveyed population and does not say what proportion of them said that they had smoked illegal tobacco, since for all of them, in fact all tobacco is illegal. Even if the 8% of people who have smoked unbranded tobacco were ALL aged 14 this would be a total of approximately 86,000 people, around 3% of the almost 3 million Australians who smoke (Department of Health and Ageing, http://www.yourhealth.gov.au/internet/yourhealth/publishing.nsf/Content/DB672C3359C610D6CA25786B0001B349/$File/Plain%20Packaging%20of%20Tobacco%20Products%20Consultation%20Paper%20-%2006042011%20FINAL.pdf).

The ad also neglects to mention measures included as part of the legislation to deal with the problem of counterfeit cigarettes (Preventative Health Taskforce, http://www.preventativehealth.org.au/internet/preventativehealth/publishing.nsf/Content/96CAC56D5328E3D0CA2574DD0081E5C0/$File/tobacco-jul09.pdf).

Certainly as argued by the Alliance no single measure can deal provide the answer to reduce the number of Australians who smoke, but the range of measures taken by the government show that plain packaging is part of a broader effort (Department of Health and Ageing, http://www.yourhealth.gov.au/internet/yourhealth/publishing.nsf/Content/DB672C3359C610D6CA25786B0001B349/$File/Plain%20Packaging%20of%20Tobacco%20Products%20Consultation%20Paper%20-%2006042011%20FINAL.pdf). Could the focus upon plain packaging on the part of tobacco companies indicate their concern that this aspect of the broader range of measures could be significant in reducing the number of Australian smokers?

The ad may reasonably be characaterised as misleadingly alarmist, targetting anxious parents, omits crucial relevant information and attempting to distract people from the role of advertising itself in stimulating harmful desires.

British American Tobacco agrees that as a manufacturer of products with serious health risks it is important that they operate responsibly (BATA, http://www.bata.com.au/group/sites/BAT_7WYKG8.nsf/vwPagesWebLive/DO7WYKSQ?opendocument&SKN=1).

The Tobacco Industry has a bad track record with honesty not to mention the ethical imperative to do no harm. The intention to deceive is an identifiable claim in law. As a result of recent history, more and more people are aware of and capable of detecting spin, as well as recognising the undeniable power of advertising to massage rational judgement. Ethical responsibility does extend beyond “legal deniability” to deceive.

Kate held a conversation with the 78 people present and spoke of her own personal journey in caring for those who work with her. Kate gave examples from her working experience in various positions within the public and the corporate sectors. Her message was that care of the people in the work place is best done by knowing their concerns and needs. Those up the ladder need to take time to get to know the people who work with them. Kate demonstrated her reflective approach to her position and the people who work for and with her. It is pleasing to see senior executives who want to work justly with care and concern for those around them. Thank you Kate for an inspiring hour.

Thanks too to Gilbert+Tobin for sponsoring the event yet again.