A brief thread on how to hold Govt to account in a time of national crisis.
The ST story over the weekend about the Govt’s early handling of the crisis as well as @pmdfoster’s story about ventilators raised important questions.
Those questions were not entirely settled by an untypically lengthy Govt response to those stories. As has been pointed out, that response failed to answer the point on several answers, picked on irrelevant detail on others, and generally raised more questions than it answered.
I certainly wouldn’t have let it stand as a witness statement from my client in any forensic process. (Though, of course, it wasn’t attempting to be that.)
But there is a deeper question here. To what extent, in the middle of the crisis, should we be trying to apportion blame for why we are where we are?
It seems to be common ground there will need to be a full public inquiry into the Govt’s handling of the crisis.
Should we wait for that inquiry before apportioning blame? That inquiry will probably take a while (though one would hope that the errors that unduly lengthened both Savile and Chilcott can be avoided).
But there is a reason why inquiries into complex events take time.
It takes time to assemble relevant documents; to match them up against people’s recollections; to get a proper sense of who knew what when in a fast-moving situation; to work out what would (probably) have happened if different decisions had been taken.
Cut those corners and you end up with an inquiry that doesn’t draw the right lessons and lacks authority.
Until then, it is likely that any analysis of what the Govt has got wrong will have to be provisional: we don’t have the full story.
And there will be lots of things it just got wrong because it had to make a judgment call on the basis of imperfect information. So “wrong” doesn’t equal “culpably wrong”.
Now, sometimes, you have to act on provisional judgments. But the question there is always forward-looking: I don’t know the full facts but is there a reason why I have to draw provisional conclusions now in order to avoid harm?
That seems to me to provide the answer to how we should be holding the Govt to account mid-crisis. We can’t at this stage definitely apportion blame, and should acknowledge that.
But we can raise questions about whether the right lessons for handling the crisis now have been drawn from what appears to have gone wrong in the past.
That is an important task for journalists, for the Opposition (which seems to be taking precisely that approach) and for Parlt.
And it also requires frankness from Govt: defensiveness about past mistakes/judgment calls isn’t the right approach, but openness about the choices now facing it, how well things are working, and the information it has to hand definitely is.
Unlike during the war, the enemy here is not listening to our every move. And though openness takes time, it really does help get decisions right, and improves public trust and confidence.
By all means point to successes. But “we have got everything right” isn’t the right starting point in response to legitimate questioning.
