“Transparency is never in the interest of those with power”

“Transparency is never in the interest of those with power”

Tom Raue writes about his experience as a whistleblower in the University of Sydney Union.

Power corrupts; there is a reason we say that. From torture in Abu Ghraib to both sides of NSW politics, people with authority abuse it. Transparency and whistle blowing help ensure they don’t get away with it. This is why powerful people and institutions develop a culture of secrecy – just in case. Even when sharing information actually serves the supposed purpose of the institution – like a student union letting students know that the university management is overseeing police brutality against students – the instinct is to keep information secret.

A series of strikes occurred at the University of Sydney throughout 2013. Large numbers of riot police were present at the pickets and they were extremely violent. One student’s leg was broken, and a staff member’s rib was cracked. At a strike on June 5, I was one of eleven people arrested on trumped up charges. After a year of trials, none of us were convicted.

University management was working closely with the police, using violence and intimidation against students and workers taking industrial action. In public, management denied that they had any control over police, but emails obtained under the Government Information (Public Access) Act showed otherwise.

Another piece of evidence pointing to collaboration was an internal University of Sydney Union document which mentioned a police officer telling University of Sydney Union (USU) staff that the police were “not in a position to do anything but follow them (protestors) unless instructed otherwise by the university”.

As Vice President of the USU, I received a copy of this report. I thought that students deserved to know that University management was controlling the police during repeated incidents of brutality. Other student executives did not want to release the information, fearing that we would face the wrath of university management. I went ahead and released that single sentence to the student newspaper Honi Soit.

The other executive members called a meeting to remove me from the board. I sought legal advice, got an injunction to stop the meeting and then spent months in the Supreme Court deciding whether they did have the power to get rid of me. As it turned out, they did, but when it came to a decision of the board there were too few votes to remove me.

The saga says a lot about organisations and how they deal with information, and it is not encouraging. Both university management and the management of the student-run USU went to great lengths to keep this information hidden.

The university repeatedly lied about its relationship with police.

The USU acted in the interests of university management instead of students, and refused to share information. Once I leaked it, they tried to get rid of me and spent a large amount of money in the process.

To fight my pro bono barrister, the USU hired a Senior Council, his junior barrister and a mid-tier law firm. They have not released the cost of this but the best guesses put it at $50,000 – $100,000. Either they will charge me for this, bankrupting me, or the student body will foot the bill. That’s how much they care about the release of a single sentence.

I was leaking information about the university and police, not the USU. But the attitude of the senior figures in the USU was to keep things secret just for the sake of it.

After I had done it, the USU decided to make an example of me.

Even when transparency is plainly in the public interest, institutions go to extreme lengths to shut down the free flow of information. Institutions are really just concentrations of power, whether the USU, University of Sydney, the Catholic Church or the US Government.

Sharing information means a relinquishing of that power and the exposure of the corruption that power invariably creates. Transparency is never in the interest of those with power.

I don’t buy that “if you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve got nothing to hide” applies to individuals. What people do in their private lives is no business of anyone else. But organisations like student unions and governments answer to the public, and really do have nothing to hide if they have done nothing wrong.

It might seem absurd to fight against other students in the Supreme Court for the right to leak a sentence, but the way we treat transparency at even the lowest level has flow-on effects. Many of the people that run the country learned how to behave in student politics, and if secrecy is allowed to fester at the lowest level it will flourish at the highest.

 

 

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