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Launch of the Ethics Advisory Service
Commissioner’s speaking notes and welcome to the launch
- Minister, distinguished guests, members of the Implementation Advisory Group, Ethics Contact Officer network members, welcome to the launch of the Ethics Advisory Service.
- First, let me acknowledge the traditional owners of this land and pay my respects to their elders, past and present
- The Ethics Advisory Service is a key element in a raft of initiatives that the Government has introduced to maintain and strengthen the ethical health of the APS and to support openness and accountability in Government.
- A well functioning ethics infrastructure that supports our working environment and encourages high standards of behaviour in public servants is critical to maintaining the confidence of the public.
- Each function and element of that infrastructure is a separate, important building block, but the individual elements should be complementary and mutually reinforcing. The Ethics Advisory Service is designed is to do just that.
- Senator Faulkner will give you more detail about the Government’s broader ethics agenda and background to the service and how it fits into and supports that agenda. He will also give his perspective on the ethical challenges that the APS is and will be facing and how the service can help agencies and their employees to meet these challenges.
- The Ethics Advisory Service is open to all Australian Public Service employees. The Government has deliberately taken the approach not to exclude categories of employees and to have an inclusive service. This may throw us some challenges, but I am firmly of the view that all staff should have access to ethical advice—that is on the application of the APS Values and Code of Conduct—when they need it.
- The APS Values and Code of Conduct apply to all of us—APS employees and agency heads alike. They are our professional standards as public servants and point the way to how we should behave. They help us to do our jobs well. All of us have experienced that gut feeling from time to time that this is a difficult or risky situation. Returning to first principles and reflecting on the APS Values and Code has proved invaluable to me in helping to think through a problem. I encourage you all look at them on a regular basis and use them in decision-making.
- I would like to emphasise the significance and distinctiveness of the advisory service that is being launched today, and the level of achievement by Commission staff in getting it up and running.
- Take the telephone and email advice element of the service, where all APS employees can seek advice on ethical issues and ethical decision making. So far as I am aware, nothing on this scale, for this purpose, has been attempted by any other Australian jurisdiction. We have had to learn about telephone systems, databases, effective telephone techniques for handling ethical queries, as well as preparing to deal with the possibility of difficult callers. The skills required are diverse.
- But as Senator Faulkner will point out, there is more to the service than just the advice lines. There are lots of other resources that have or are being developed to help us in sustaining the ethical health of the APS, and some are on display here. So please take the opportunity to inspect them once the formal launch is over.
- One of the by-products of the establishment of the service is that it has encouraged us to think about new ways of communicating our message. The service will have its own web page, of course, and we have also developed the first of a series of vodcasts that illustrate ethical problems that may arise in the workplace. These can be accessed from our website and used in workplaces to illustrate and stimulate discussion of ethical issue.
- My colleague, the Merit Protection Commissioner, will take us through one of these vodcasts after the Minister’s presentation.
- I also want to emphasise that a key operational premise of the Ethics Advisory Service is that it will work in partnership with agencies. Working with the Implementation Advisory Group, as well as other contacts we have had with agencies during the development stage of the service, has significantly enhanced our understanding and appreciation of the excellent internal ethical advice systems that many of you already have in place.
- The aim of our service is to complement these systems through providing an additional resource for advice and guidance. We also want to share with you, on a regular basis, the data and the trends we pick up through our calls database so that we are all better placed to identify emerging trends and issues in ethical health.
- I will report formally on the work of the service to Parliament annually through my State of the Service Report.
- The key partnership organisation is the Ethics Contact Officer Network, comprising representatives of most APS agencies. As its name implies, it will have an important role in providing a point of contact between the service and individual agencies, to ensure that staff are aware of what it can do and to give us feedback on its effectiveness.
- But the role of the network goes beyond that. It’s a group of ethical practitioners that can identify issues, share experiences and suggest responses to emerging ethical challenges, including how the Commission can best help. It will be an invaluable resource for maintaining and enhancing ethical heath in agencies and across the public service.
- I want to welcome the network members here today and to thank their agencies for nominating them. I am sure that in joining the network, many of you will have taken on an extra workload and I thank you for your interest and dedication.
- I also want to ask agencies to continue to maintain your support for your network representative who, apart from their contribution to the Ethics Advisory Service, will be able to add considerable value to your internal ethical systems.
- The development of the Ethics Advisory Service has been a co-operative effort, and we intend to continue on in this vein.
- The Implementation Advisory Group – comprising senior representatives of the ATO, Centrelink, Defence, DEEWR, Finance, Immigration and the Australian Mint – has been invaluable in providing the perspective of operating agencies. The way in which the service will operate is very much a reflection of the experience and knowledge of the Implementation Advisory Group members and without them we would have had a very difficult learning curve indeed. I thank them for their contribution.
- I will now ask the Cabinet Secretary, Senator Faulkner, to formally launch the Ethics Advisory Service.
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