Frank Furedi

Clear and present danger in the vainglorious pursuit of freedom, justice and transparency
Whenever a policy-maker is at a loss for an answer, the demand for more transparency trips off the tongue.

Julia Gillard promises reforms “driven by transparency, quality and choice”. Kevin Rudd says “transparency and competitive neutrality” are essential, and Barack Obama says “transparency provides information for citizens about what their government is doing”. Transparency has become a political hurrah word.

Transparency has nothing to do with genuine accountability. It actually short-circuits the process of deliberation required to test out the ideas for which politicians and officials will be held to account.

In a democratic society, public officials should be held to account for their actions and decisions, and not for the manner in which they came to their conclusions.

Any official or politician exposed for attempting to exchange his private thoughts with colleagues “in confidence” will be denounced. This is what happened recently when it was revealed the office of Michael Gove, the British Education Secretary, went to great lengths to communicate through private email exchanges.

As is common practice in many departments of the state, officials go to great lengths to conceal their discussions from discovery under Freedom of Information laws. Presumably some policy-makers in Britain’s Education Department took the view that they would like to keep their private deliberations just that, private.

As with transparency, almost everyone declares tremendous enthusiasm for Freedom of Information laws, at least in public. In private it is experienced as an obstacle to be overcome.

Former prime minister Tony Blair wrote in his memoir that one of his biggest mistakes was to introduce the Freedom of Information Act in parliament. He stated that “it is a dangerous act” because it made it very difficult for a government to debate the serious issues of the day in confidence”. You “naive, foolish, irresponsible nincompoop” is how he described his own role in the enactment of this legislation.

So why did the Blair government introduce what he now perceives as a dangerous act? For the same reason every leading politician feels compelled to swear loyalty to the ritual of transparency. When public life is dominated by a mood of suspicion, the institutionalisation of transparency promises to leave little to the imagination.

The advocates of total openness claim transparency empowers all citizens, for it allows them to hold their government to account for all of its actions. They also suggest that a regime of full disclosure is the precondition for overcoming public mistrust.

This is supposedly what the website tweetMP-Transparency in Australian Government means when it declares that it “is bringing more transparency to Australian government by tracking ministers of parliament on Twitter and persuading all MPs to tweet”.

Experience shows that transparency has turned into a ritual of hypocrisy. Moreover, in all of its forms the institutionalisation of transparency encourages dishonesty and deception, which in turn fuels even more confusion and suspicion. “Text me and don’t use the email” is what many officials tell colleagues who want to have an off-the-record chat.

One acquaintance, who runs a large public sector organisation, boasts that he writes the minutes of the discussion before the meeting and takes great care to ensure that nothing that can be “misinterpreted” is recorded.

Like any sensible individual, he understands that virtually any innocent remark or proposal can be interpreted as a statement of malevolent intent when taken out of context. A half-baked idea raised by a junior official in passing can appear as evidence of the “real agenda” when circulated by bloggers or in a newspaper column.

The imperative of transparency forces people to be always on guard. It often leads people to avoid giving an honest opinion.

These days people write letters of reference with an eye to possible legal consequences. Such letters of reference often avoid critical remarks and rely on vague euphemisms to communicate the idea that the person under discussion may not be an Einstein.

Letters, like internal memoranda, can now be made available to the public and consequently a new regime of self-censorship prevails. Is it any surprise that academics don’t take too seriously the letters that they send to each other and sometimes phone each other to find out their “real opinion”?

The ethos of transparency encourages a climate of organisational caution and conformity. It discourages the clash of opinions and diminishes the potential for the open clarification of problems.

People are unlikely to take risks and disclose their real concerns in front of whole world. In such an environment, people have little incentive to acknowledge mistakes, and typically a regime of responsibility aversion prevails.

It is difficult for individuals to throw out ideas or to express unconventional views since they court being ridiculed or stigmatised by their public critics, who have no stake in the outcome of their deliberations.

The main accomplishment of the cult of transparency is to eliminate informal exchanges of views and particularly to abolish the exchange of confidences. And without the exchanges of confidences it is not possible for people to have real confidence in their colleagues and in the organisations that employ them.

The present confusion of accountability for decisions with accountability for institutional behaviour is symptomatic of a political culture of voyeurism that thrives on leaks and gossip. A democratic society also understands that it is important to uphold the right to the private exchange of views and that not everything officials do ought to be visible to all.

Back in 1946, George Orwell reminded us that in his time “political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible”. It was words such as transparency that he had in mind, when he added that “if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought”.

When politicians, who in their heart of hearts understand the perils of transparency, still insist on performing its rituals, the corruption of thought becomes no less a problem in 2011 than in Orwell’s time.

And by the way, a tweeting MP is not striking a blow for democracy. They are merely someone with a lot of spare time.

First published by The Australian, 1 October 2011

Tweet