Australia’s quest to become a republic without grey corruption
Low-ranking officials who held the line against Trump can teach us all a lesson
There are persistent cliches about public servants – they are mousy and pernickety; they love rules more than people. Charles Dickens satirised the bureaucracy brilliantly in Little Dorrit, inventing a department called the Circumlocution Office, whose officials existed to obfuscate and obstruct.
But public servants can be quietly noble too, and recent examples abound. Take the case of Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, and her mother Ruby Freeman, two ordinary American women who were working as electoral officials in Georgia during the 2020 presidential election.
Many state electoral officials have testified at the Congressional Hearings into the storming of the Capitol building on January 6th, 2021. But Moss and Freeman struck me as the bravest because they were low-ranking and had much to lose.
The hearings have shown how relentlessly Trump and his political henchmen pressured officials to overturn the democratic results of the 2020 election. Bennie Thompson, the Democratic chair of the January 6 committee, says that “pressuring public servants into betraying their oaths was a fundamental part of the playbook” for Trump in his insistence on taking illegal power.
The women, electoral officials in Fulton County, Georgia, helped process the vote count on Election Day. Trump and his supporters falsely accused them of processing fraudulent votes for his democratic rival Joe Biden. Moss and her mother subsequently became the centre of a conspiracy campaign which led to them receiving death threats and racist abuse (the women are African-American). They suffered enormous stress and had to go into hiding.
“Our democracy held because courageous people … put their oath to the constitution above their loyalty to one man or to one party,” committee member Adam Schiff said. “The system held, but barely. And the question remains: will it hold again?”
The state of the United States Supreme Court, now ruled by a religiously hellbent, conservative majority, is a prime example of how well malignant administrations can corrupt public offices without doing anything illegal.
The political stacking of the court’s bench is known as “grey corruption”. Grey corruption has describes government decision-many to serve a special interest group, a powerful, cashed-up donor, or a political ally or interest. It refers to the doling out of taxpayer funds to serve the political interests of those in power, as opposed to the merits of chosen projects. That will sound familiar to anyone paying attention to Australian politics over the last few years.
Just in the last week, in NSW, the Perrottet government has faced hugely negative press coverage over the appointment of former deputy premier John Barilaro to a lucrative US trade commissioner role. It is unclear why the excellent civilian candidate who was chosen for the role via a merit process was summarily dumped, just a few days before Barilaro resigned from politics.
The stacking of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal – the body which reviews government decisions – by the former Morrison government was also notable. Over the past three years, 40 per cent of AAT appointments have had political ties. That was eight times the level of political appointments made under the Howard, Rudd and Gillard governments. The body is now so politicised that Labor Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus is considering scrapping it altogether.
Statutory and public service appointments are not sexy, and they don’t make headlines. If the process behind them lacks transparency, it can be hard to know, given the jobs might not even be advertised. These jobs include everything from executive roles in Commonwealth companies like Australia Post to departmental secretaries, ambassadorships, and appointments like the auditor-general, the electoral commissioner, charities commissioner and the head of the Fair Work Commission.
All of these bodies are supposed to operate at arm’s length from government, as a vital check-and-balance on political power. Which is precisely why it suits politicians to undermine their independence.
Grey corruption is not only a moral issue, or one of civic trust (something that is fast eroding in the United States, a country that chooses not to protect its schoolchildren from slaughter). It is also an economic issue – countries with high levels of grey corruption face economic stagnation.
Why invest or take an entrepreneurial risk when you can’t be sure the playing field is level; and you’re suspicious about the true motives of government stake-holders? If you’re a talented graduate, why would you join the public service when you know the top jobs are likely to be handed out to the politically well-connected?
But most importantly, if public service and statutory appointments are made according to merit, the people filling them will, ideally, form a last line of defence against Trumpian-style pressure. Only then can you know – or trust – that the system will hold.
This time it’s true — the Jan. 6 testimony really was explosive
More fallout and media reaction from this week’s blockbuster Jan. 6 hearings
The first comes from a visit I made myself to Morocco twenty years ago when I spent a week with Medicin sans Frontiers in Tangiers, meeting refugees from sub-Saharan Africa who were trying to get to Europe. My guide and interpreter was a man who asked me to call him Pascal; he didn’t want anyone to know his real name. He was on the run from people who wanted him dead because they thought he was the wrong religion. He could speak more languages than most people I’ve met; he had the top segment of a finger missing, and an earlobe gone too, and when I asked him what had happened to him he told me he lost both to the netting of an underwater barbed wire fence he’d been trapped in and had had to tear himself free of so as not to drown.
“Words are the chesspieces by which the powers that be will play their games with our lives” words swords words
The Courage of Jan. 6 Witness Cassidy Hutchinson
She showed more guts than any of Trump’s men. Her testimony strengthens the case for prosecution
Only a woman would have done what Cassidy Hutchinson did because only a woman, in a place of such power and prestige, would have registered everything and taken such close notes instead of spending that time swanning around being important.
Here she was, all by herself, 26 years old, in front of the whole country.
I found her testimony to the Jan. 6 committee entirely credible. If she lied I see no motive. Any who know otherwise, who can rebut what she said, should come forward and, like her, testify under oath.
She was steadily promoted in Donald Trump’s White House, rising from intern to primary assistant to chief of staff Mark Meadows. She was by all accounts professional and discreet, a conservative, a Trumpian committed to the higher political mission. The powerful men around her appear to have been undefended in her presence and spoke freely—she’s only a kid, a girl, what can she do? She helps the steward clean ketchup off the wall after the president has a tantrum and throws his plates and silverware. In the scheme of things she’s nobody.
And yet such people can upend empires.
By being there this week, she showed a lot more guts than the men of that White House. Mr. Meadows, counsel Pat Cipollone and others—her testimony made them sound like a bunch of jabbering hysterics. You tell the president not to do that! No, you tell him! They worried about legal exposure. Ms. Hutchinson paraphrased Mr. Cipollone: “We’re going to get charged with every crime imaginable!”
You get the impression she, on the other hand, was worrying about what was right.
Now alone, with the administration over but its men still hiding, she came forward, and what she said changed everything. Her testimony made criminal charges against the former president more likely. In National Review, former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy wrote that her testimony was devastating in that it portrayed Donald Trump as “singularly culpable” for the events of 1/6. As to the disputed limousine fight between the president and his Secret Service agents, Mr. McCarthy says, sensibly: Let them speak under oath. Ms. Hutchinson didn’t say that the skirmish occurred but that she had been told it had—by an agent who was there, minutes after it allegedly happened. There’s nothing wrong in this venue with hearsay. “The point of an investigation is to search for reliable, admissible evidence,” Mr. McCarthy writes. “For that, hearsay is not only allowed but encouraged.”
David French in the Dispatch also saw Ms. Hutchinson’s testimony as strengthening the case for prosecution. Mr. Trump approved of the riot, intended to walk to the Capitol with the mob, thought Vice President Mike Pence
Ms. Hutchinson’s testimony must be corroborated by others who might have heard Mr. Trump say this. But if it stands, an indictment “would be a relatively simple story,” Mr. French writes.
“First, Trump summoned the mob to Washington.” Second, he “knew the mob was armed and dangerous.” Third, he exhorted them to “fight like hell” and march on the Capitol. Ms. Hutchinson said he attempted to lead it himself. Fourth, he further inflamed the mob after the attack began by tweeting: “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what was necessary.”
With this fact pattern, his earlier admonition to the crowd to move forward “peacefully and patriotically” looks, to Mr. French’s eyes, “more like pro forma ass-covering than a genuine plea. It was a drop of pacifism in an ocean of incitement.”
- The purpose of gathering all possible information on this ugly historical event is to see that those who did it are exposed and punished so it never happens again. If Mr. Trump had succeeded, he would have produced a new era, in which democracy and its processes would no longer work in America, in which the outcome of every national election would be a question. We can’t allow that because we can’t survive that way, we’d be finished.
What is important now is getting more people testifying publicly under oath. More people are going to want to talk. The committee should be given the resources to pick up its pace and lengthen its schedule.
After Ms. Hutchinson, the testimony of Messrs. Meadows and Cipollone is more crucial than ever. Mr. Meadows was in the thick of everything on 1/6 and before, as the conspiracy unfolded. Ms. Hutchinson said he asked for a presidential pardon. Did he? For what? (Mr. Meadows has denied it.)
Mr. Cipollone, also at the heart of events, is an interesting case. Almost every book and article about the end of the Trump administration portrays him as a bit of a hero, so it’s generally assumed he was more than a bit of a source. Why so shy now?
He knows whether Ms. Hutchinson told the truth. He knows more than that.
Mr. Cipollone is said to have concerns regarding questions of executive privilege. Rep. Liz Cheney implied in hearings that it was simpler than that: “Our committee is certain that Donald Trump does not want Mr. Cipollone to testify here.”
It is possible he’s keen to keep his business and political ties to Trumpworld and has concluded he can maintain them by never saying in public what one might say in private, on background. Let the girl be brave; he will be careful.
But he owes the public that paid his salary the truth, and until he does his Washington nickname, “Patsy Baloney,” will stick.
I end with Ms. Cheney. When the boys in GOP congressional leadership stripped her of her position and threw her over the side, they were, as usual, making a mistake. She was far less dangerous inside the tent fighting Mr. Trump than outside the tent bringing him to justice. It would have been easy for them to put Republicans on the committee, but whenNancy Pelosi rejected their first two choices, they withdrew, calculating Republican absence would damage the committee. It made the committee—less obfuscation, less sowing of chaos.
Wednesday night at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, Calif., Ms. Cheney gave a long scheduled speech in the Time for Choosing series. (I am part of it and a board member.) The series asks speakers to present a vision of the party’s future. The library plays it straight, siding with no party faction or view, giving all an equal hearing.
Ms. Cheney’s speech was sold out days in advance, but it was an open question how she’d be received. She, being Liz Cheney, quickly addressed the elephant in the room. It is “painful for Republicans to accept,” she said, but “we have to choose. Because Republicans cannot both be loyal to Donald Trump and loyal to the Constitution.”
The audience . . . erupted in cheers. She got a standing ovation.
Sometimes girls don’t get misjudged.
Happy 246th Fourth of July to the great and fabled nation that is still, this day, the hope of the world.
Lowly Institute: The political courage of the January 6th investigation
- Trump and Biden Both Face Rejection June 23, 2022
- Trump Voters Need a New Direction June 16, 2022
- The Boiling Over of America June 9, 2022
- The Uvalde Police Scandal June 2, 2022
- Let Not Our Hearts Grow Numb May 26, 2022
A life dedicated to the law and justice, without fear or favour