Author’s Notes — No. 1

Ithica is fiction. The questions behind it are not.

Thank you for joining me. It is greatly appreciated.

Why I write?

I wrote Ithica — and, before that, Spook Justice — in response to failures and threats I encountered from government systems at multiple levels.

Too many Australians have been harmed, abandoned or destroyed by institutions that protect themselves instead of the people they are meant to serve. This includes, in my experience, sections of the Australian judiciary.

People have died.

Other deaths, disappearances and ruined lives continue to raise questions that have never been properly answered.

Many of these questions are met with silence.

That silence can take many forms. Australian politicians, local councils, state governments and federal departments can all produce remarkably similar responses: write to another department, thank you for sharing your story, the matter is historical, that does not happen, you are wrong, it is classified, your Freedom of Information request is refused, it is not my responsibility.

Sometimes the response becomes more personal. Why are you doing this? You are obsessive. You are delusional. Stop pursuing it.

In my own experience, it has sometimes gone considerably further. I have been threatened with imprisonment and years of court proceedings, and I have been warned that some people wanted me dead.

These are serious matters, but the purpose of writing about them is not to shock people. It is to ask why systems that are supposed to serve the public can become so hostile to the very people asking them to do their job.

The bureaucratic carousel

Anyone who has spent long enough dealing with government probably recognises the pattern. Eventually, the person raising the problem can become the problem.

This is what I call the bureaucratic carousel.

The important point is not simply that this is frustrating. It is expensive.

Bureaucracy is necessary, but when people stop listening, simple problems become years of letters, reviews, legal costs, inquiries and compensation — much of it avoidable if the matter had been dealt with properly in the first place.

There is the obvious financial cost to government and therefore to taxpayers. Departments employ staff to answer correspondence, lawyers become involved, decisions are reviewed, court cases are fought, inquiries are established and compensation may eventually be paid.

Yet even when compensation is awarded in Australia, it may fall well short of what the person has actually spent trying to obtain justice — before any value is placed on the years lost, the stress, damaged health or the effect on their family.

The result can be remarkably perverse. The public pays for the original failure, pays for government to defend it, and may eventually pay compensation, while the person who challenged the decision can still finish financially and personally worse off.

And much of this may have started because somebody did not listen, somebody refused to check, somebody would not admit a mistake, or somebody decided that passing the matter elsewhere was easier than dealing with it properly.

This is not just an Australian problem

It would be comforting to think these failures were unusual. They are not.

Australia had Robodebt. Britain has had the Post Office Horizon scandal. The Netherlands has had its childcare-benefits scandal. The United States has faced serious failures involving the treatment of military veterans and other government programs.

The circumstances are different, but there is something familiar about the way these stories develop. An institution believes its system is correct. The person affected says it is not. The institution has departments, lawyers, procedures, specialists, public money and time. The individual usually has very few of those things.

Eventually somebody looks properly. There may be an inquiry, court proceedings, compensation or an apology.

I am not suggesting these scandals are connected. What interests me is that similar institutional behaviour can appear in completely different countries and completely different systems.

And these are democracies.

Government systems will sometimes fail. Human beings design them and human beings operate them. The more revealing question is how an organisation responds when somebody points out the failure. Does it listen, investigate and correct the problem, or does it begin defending itself?

But we have journalists?

We do, and good journalism matters enormously.

But in my experience, Australian journalists have too often been reluctant to investigate difficult matters until those matters become impossible to ignore. Then the scandal breaks, inquiries begin, headlines appear, interviews follow and eventually everybody asks how it could possibly have happened.

Perhaps another useful question is why nobody wanted to know earlier.

This is not an attack on every journalist, politician, public servant or judge. There are good people inside all of these professions and institutions.

The problem arises when enough people decide it is easier, safer or more convenient not to look. One person says the matter is historical. Another invokes secrecy. Another says there is insufficient evidence. Someone else decides that becoming involved may not be helpful to their career.

Nobody needs to organise an enormous conspiracy. People simply protect their own small part of the system.

At its worst, the result can begin to resemble a protection racket without anybody ever sitting down and formally creating one.

And the person outside the system is left with the same result: nothing happens.

Respect may be cheaper

Government departments deal with people every day. Most of those encounters are ordinary: a payment, a licence, a benefit, a tax matter, a complaint, an entitlement or a request for information. Most should never become battles.

If people are treated with respect, listened to properly and given clear answers, many problems can be resolved quickly. If something has gone wrong, acknowledge it, examine it and fix it.

That sounds almost embarrassingly simple. But once a system begins denying, delaying and defending, the cost can escalate dramatically. What might once have required one sensible decision can turn into years of administration, legal proceedings and public expense.

Legal firms can add substantially to those costs. Lawyers quite properly examine evidence in detail, build files, prepare submissions, brief counsel and appear in court. Court fees and associated costs accumulate, sometimes over many years, while judges preside over proceedings that may have begun with a matter that could perhaps have been resolved far earlier.

By then, the original problem can become almost secondary to the machinery created around it.

Respect is not simply about politeness. It may also be considerably cheaper.

And that brings me back to Ithica

Ithica is a dark farce. Yes, it is fiction.

Its characters encounter absurd institutions, absurd decisions and people behaving in ways that sometimes become so ridiculous that laughter seems the most sensible response.

But underneath the humour are questions that are not fictional.

An institution can become more concerned with protecting itself than helping the people it exists to serve. Secrecy can become an excuse rather than a necessity. Numerous organisations can be involved in the same matter while responsibility seems to belong to nobody.

At some point, dealing with the bureaucracy can become more damaging than the problem that brought you there in the first place.

Even if you have never spent years fighting a government department, you are still paying for the system. You pay for the original administration. You pay when it goes wrong. You pay for the inquiry into why it went wrong. You pay for the lawyers. You may pay compensation. Then you may pay for the new system designed to replace the old one.

Perhaps doing the right thing at the beginning would be cheaper. It might also be considerably healthier.

Where these Notes go next

That is what these Author’s Notes are going to explore.

Some will look at public records and government decisions. Some will deal with Defence and intelligence. Others will look at military history, public money, secrecy and accountability.

There will be JORN. There will be the considerably less serious world of HMAS Syphon. There will also be Ithica, Spook Justice, future books and some of the experiences and ideas that eventually find their way into fiction.

There will be humour as well. There has to be. Sometimes humour lets us look again at something that has become so familiar that we have stopped asking whether it should be happening at all.

I do not expect everyone reading these Notes to agree with me. That is not the point. I would rather people question what I write, add to it, disagree with it and bring their own experiences to the discussion.

Perhaps the question underneath all of this is actually quite simple:

Could we do this better?

Ithica is fiction. The bureaucratic carousel is not.

Paul Sharpless