SHABBY TREATMENT FOR HONEST MAN
30.09.1989
By: KAVANAGH L
Shabby treatment for an honest man LET'S get this straight _ $30 million of our money has been wasted on drought relief in Queensland and the only one to be punished is the honest public servant who privately warned his staff to be vigilant against such waste.
The new Premier, Mr Cooper, says he will take no action. That leaves one honest man, Dan Daly, as the only person to have suffered for the scandal he inadvertently exposed.
Daly, then Primary Industry drought secretariat director, was the bloke who wrote a private memo alerting his stock inspectors to be vigilant against drought relief rorts.
The memo was leaked, the rorting exposed and Daly was rewarded with a move to the back room.
The parliamentary public accounts committee this week confirmed what Daly suspected . . . rorting of the most sacred of all government funding _ drought relief.
Can you imagine anyone rorting a scheme designed to provide urgent emergency relief for the needy?
I get cranky when real men like Dan Daly are disadvantaged for honesty, and I'd like to recall a column I wrote seven years ago about another honest bloke I knew, my old man, and address it to the Dan Dalys of this world.
It went like this: ""A couple of years ago we buried the old man and being the scribe of the family it fell to me to write something on his marker.
""It wasn't easy. Try putting 85 years of any man's life into 10 words or less. All the good times and the bad, from the horrors of Flanders fields in World War I to the quiet days sitting in the sun sharing a drink and a yarn.
""But the more I thought about it the clearer it became, because the thread that ran through my old man's life, like thousands of others of his time, was honesty. I never knew him to tell a lie. I never knew him to take what wasn't his. He was an ordinary sort of bloke. He was an honest man.
""Well, after a lot of worry I struck on the line I thought most appropriate. I even got carried away and wrote an ambitious epilogue for the priest whose job it was to say nice things about the departed man he hardly knew.
""Naturally he knew better than that and my well-planned epilogue got mangled along the way by scriptures and analogies of mice and men.
But working in newspapers you get used to that. There hasn't been a story written that someone didn't think they could write better.
""So my epilogue got mangled. But the words on my old man's grave remain and there is no one in this world or the next who can change them.
"" "An Honest Man At Rest', they say.
""That may sound simple to you, but to me they tell the story of my old man and many, many other ordinary people like him. I don't know if they thought about honesty much, it was just something they did naturally . . . being honest. Anything less was not the right thing.
""I wish I could say the same about a lot of other people today, particularly the people who get into positions of power which can affect the lives of ordinary people, be they in politics or big business . . .'' Well, that's what I wrote about my old man and honest people like him seven years ago, and I reckon if I outlive Dan Daly I could write the same about him. Because there seems little doubt he is an honest man whose reward has been the indignity and embarrassment of being removed from a job too well done.
The Daly experience no doubt will be a warning to all other public servants not only to ignore maladministration, even corruption, in their departments, but also to be very, very careful directing their workmates to be vigilant for the same.
You commit something to paper, it leaks, and very soon you find yourself in the back room going nowhere, fast.
As I've said before, there must be an Official Secrets Act to stop public servants running to the press with every snippet of irrelevant office gossip. But there certainly is a need for public servants to speak out without fear of reprisal when they witness rorting within the system.
If that had been the case a decade ago we would have been spared much of the shabbiness revealed by the Fitzgerald inquiry.
Instead, we have the case of Dan Daly being penalised for doing his job within the rules, unwittingly exposing multi-million-dollar rorts, thus saving the taxpayer millions of dollars, and his reward is the back room.
Obviously the people who have rorted the drought relief scheme of millions don't care, but I do and I think there will be rewards for people like Dan Daly.
As I wrote in the column I mentioned earlier: ""I'll bet I got it right about the rewards of honesty. I'll bet my old man and thousands like him are at peace with themselves today, wherever it is honest men go to rest.''
Blokes like Dan Daly are surely headed that way.
The others? I hope they get their just deserts too.
(Kavanagh will be autographing the book Kavanagh on Queensland today 11am to 12.30pm at Toombul Shoppingtown News.)
