Integrity Bodies

A tactic used by the Complaints Resolution Agency in Defence, was to advise commanders facing allegations from whistleblower disclosures, not to treat or progress those disclosures as a ‘Redress of Wrongs’ application – the Redress process is the process that required detailed reasons to be given.

Commanders were advised to make comment in performance appraisals about the officer or soldier, and to force the officer or soldier whistleblower to seek ‘Redress’ as part of the procedure allowed with unfavourable Performance Appraisals. The advantage for the commander here was that the Performance Appraisal procedure did not require that the commander give detailed reasons for any decision. That demonstrates the difficulty to ill-intentioned commanders and their advisers of the 'detailed reasons' requirement and one of the major efforts to get around the requirement. There were others.

The decision by an Investigation Officer to find that the whistleblower in the ‘domino’ document narrative was mentally imbalanced, in part because of his persistence in pursuing his rights to detailed reasons including findings on the facts about a document that he had been shown, occurred during an inquiry into military justice by eminent Australian jurist, The Honourable Sir Laurence Street. In the ‘Report on the Independent Review on the Health of the Reformed Military Justice System’, this eminent jurist stated:

As the final arbiters of many personnel performance decisions, commanders and managers must provide a clear ‘Statement of Reasons’ (SOR) for their executive decision making, indicating the factors that they have taken into consideration and any specific weightings that were used in making their executive decisions. These processes allow for executive decision making to be challenged and explained, providing a level of protection that should be reassuring for both the individual and the ADO. (underlining added)

The word ‘must’ is strongly emphatic of the link between detailed reasons and protection.

Currently, the Australian Defence Force has removed the Defence Instruction requiring detailed reasons, and the explanation of what was meant by ‘detailed reasons’ and what was not meant by the same terms have also been removed.

The words in that defence Instruction, now removed, is an excellent example of the approach recommended by QWAG in dealing with the tactics known to be used by ill-intentioned commanders and commands (or executives or managers). Specific words were added to the Defence Instruction to tell Chiefs of Army and Defence Force Chiefs that they could not use vague statements of reasons. Another example - the Public Service Act (Qld) instructed that appeals must address the complaint actually made, because of the common tactic of hearing appeals that were not made in lieu of the appeal actually made. Both of these provisions were unsuccessful because the provisions would not be enforced by respective Offices of the Ombudsman. Decisions about claims of abuse in Defence can now be given without reasons, and the Defence whistleblower experienced that in 2016. Twenty-one inquiries into military justice in 21 years, and yet the credibility of military justice has deteriorated, rather than been improved, by all those inquiries. Those inquiries, at an enormous public expense, appear to have been used to refine methods for abusing members within the military, instead of to deliver justice.

Lieutenant General Morrison’s saying that ‘the standard that you walk past is the standard that you set’, is trivial, and fundamentally misses the key duty. Rather, the appropriate saying for commanders in Defence is that ‘the standard that you set is what you do, sir, when nobody else is allowed to see’.

All this brings the focus back to QWAG's rationale about the importance of a WPA. This could be a force for enforcement of laws within allegedly ill-intentioned agencies like Defence.