Royal Commissions Into Everything

We're hip deep in royal commissions at the moment.  A royal commission is a sort of broad ranging enquiry with widespread powers to investigate some issue or other.  It is generally an indication that an institution of some kind has screwed up royally, hence the name.  As well as a commission into a government programme to insulate homes which would up with people burning to death we have a commission into union corruption and another into systematic child abuse perpetrated by various institutions tasked with their care, principally although not exclusively, the church.  As a result all sorts of shocking revelations have come to light.  Shocking revelations are pretty much what royal commissions produce.  This sells newspapers, entertains the public and, on occasion, rectifies or at least highlights long term abuses.  It's more than a little sad that a royal commission is required to achieve the last of these.

While the revelations can be horrifying what they shouldn't be is surprising.  The sad fact of the matter is that institutions of the sort that tend to be investigated by a royal commission; police, unions, churches, charities, government departments and so forth are particularly susceptible to corruption and abuse.  There are a number of reasons for this, the first is simply opportunity.  There are always a few horrible people in any organisation and organisations with the size, power and breadth of those mentioned above are very difficult to police.  Nobody, however well intentioned can keep an eye on what everybody connected with the organisation is doing at any given moment.  Pockets of corruption whether expressed in simple venality or the more vile examples coming to light in the child abuse investigation will always occur.  But what transforms isolated transgressions into a systemic problem?

Here we encounter a problem peculiar to the organisations I mentioned earlier.  All of them exist to benefit others and to be most effective they require the trust of the people they serve.  All of them have within their ranks many honest, upright people who have dedicated their lives to the organisation and its ideals.  Theoretically this should make them remarkably resistant to corruption, in fact the opposite is true.

An organisation which relies on the trust of others will go to extraordinary lengths to maintain that trust.  Including deception, concealment and outright lying.  Those who serve it see the damage bad publicity could do and the harm to the genuinely noble cause the organisation espouses and they try very hard to make sure nobody finds out about any such transgressions.  The greatest allies the corrupt possess are the legion of decent dedicated people who feel they are somehow serving the greater good by sweeping any "unpleasantness" under the carpet.  These people, terrified of the shame that will be brought on their organisation should the truth be known collaborate in lies.  Without these people isolated pockets of corruption would remain just that, isolated and relatively easy to deal with.  Instead, with protection assured the corrupt grow bolder, waverers are tempted and idealism is lost.  In time the corrupt make their way further up the rungs of the organisation and ensure that those moving into places below them are people they can work with, or on.  Ultimately the organisation itself will exist solely to further the greed or ambitions of the people who now control it.

Don't the enablers of corruption realise what they're doing?  On some occasions and on an intellectual level, quite possibly but the decision they have made is not an intellectual one, it is an emotional one.  When a person joins an organisation, imbued with the ideals it was designed to promote they tend to develop an intense loyalty to the organisation itself quite apart from its stated goals.  The minister or priest in your church on Sunday isn't a man of God, he's a man of the church and it is the church, not God, who has his first loyalty.  Similarly the union representative is not a representative of the workers, he's a representative of the union.  As such these decent, honest people are prepared to indulge in almost any sort of skullduggery to protect and serve their organisation, often to the detriment of the people they intended to help.

The silliest thing about the whole affair is that there is a very simple way for an organisation to deal with corruption.  Publicity!  Rather than an outside investigation laying the whole rotten edifice bare most organisations would retain a great deal more public trust if they were seen to be systematically cleaning their own house.  People are generally aware that corruption exists and that it exists within institutions.  An institution would gain a great deal more trust if it showed that it could openly acknowledge the fact and deal with it in an effective manner.  Instead the people within these organisations show a deep level of distrust, not to say contempt, for the reasoning abilities of the people they are supposed to be helping.  They think they can maintain trust by deceit and trickery.  And they never learn.  Royal commission follows royal commission and after each one the situation gradually reverts back to the circumstances that inspired the commission in the first place.  It might be useful to have a permanent royal commission into pretty much everything but if we did that it would get corrupted as well.  The real strength of a royal commission is in its adhoc nature.  If it became an institution it wouldn't be too long before we needed a royal commission into it as well.