Elected political and ministerial life is unique, as a workplace or industry. Every other business or organisation is also accountable, but none have the same ultimate accountability in which power holders receive, retain and lose their social licence to operate through periodic, direct elections by the entire community.
Add parliamentary exposure, including under parliamentary privilege, and the level of sustained media scrutiny, and you get a lot of distinctions in how integrity issues should be handled.
However, in fundamental ways, the importance of public trust and the power being wielded – the highest lawmaking and decision-making in the land – only increase the need for parliamentary and ministerial integrity systems to at least match, and preferably surpass, what we accept as healthy and normal for other types of organisations.
So there is a simple answer to the question – should a leader have, and trigger, a mechanism for confidential, independent review of an historical allegation of serious misconduct by a senior officeholder or employee, which, for whatever reason, a police referral cannot resolve? That answer is often, ‘yes’.
This is true for any organisation where the allegation is serious and credible enough to affect a leader’s judgement regarding a person’s fitness for office, their capacity to command internal respect and fulfil their role, and any actions needed to sustain external stakeholder trust.
What if the allegation is from years before? In some industries the answer may be that the alleged historical misconduct either was never relevant, or no longer relevant to the employee’s role and standing. But in other, probably many settings, reaching as good a view as possible on what actually happened may remain important and indeed, may definitely be required.
Imagine a school principal – public or private – presented with a previously unknown and untested allegation that one of their senior teachers committed a sexual assault, at any time in their past, which could not be investigated to a criminal standard, because the alleged victim had since died or refused to proceed with a criminal process. Would that entitle the principal or the institution’s leaders to simply say “rule of law satisfied”, “I have no further power or responsibility here”?
Quite simply – no. We would still expect that school principal to refer the matter for independent, albeit non-criminal investigation, in order to be able to assess, to the maximum extent possible, what, if any, action was needed to ensure safety, security and trust in the current organisation. Whatever those actions might be, including a more reliable exculpation.
Have we not learned the wider lessons of one of our most important and substantial public inquiries, the royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse?
The equivalent test for a leader in politics and parliament is naturally different, and unique to the role of an education leader – but it is not that different.
Especially when there’s hard evidence of wider problems of conduct and culture in the federal parliamentary working environment; some current or recent, but others longstanding and even historical.