The maintenance of high ethical values is critical to the maintenance and enhancement of public trust and confidence in government and government services.
The 2011 corruption perceptions index
New Zealand’s public servants can be proud of being perceived as the least corrupt in the world. Transparency International recently published the Corruption Perception Index for 2011, in which New Zealand sits at the very top, narrowly beating Denmark, Finland and Sweden. You can view the results here and access data and analyses of corruption indicators at the Transparency International
website.
Fraud awareness in the public sector
The Auditor-General has recently released findings of a survey into fraud awareness in the public sector. All in all, it reinforces the perception of the high integrity of the NZ public sector. An overview is available here and an a detailed report is available here. Respondents come from the public service, state sector, District Health Boards & local government as well as tertiary institutions and schools A report that presents findings by sector will be published in due course.
State Services Commission's ethics framework
Ethics network volunteers worked with us to provide feedback to the State Services Commission on guidance material for public servants. We’d like to formally thank those volunteers for their time and energy.
Please visit the SSC website to see the new resources.
Political Neutrality Wellington-based Ethics Network members met in February to discuss guidance on political neutrality.
PSA National Secretary Brenda Pilott introduced the session and spoke of the guidance from the State Services Commission. In our view this guidance is not clear and does not place enough emphasis on human rights and freedom of expression. PSA Solicitor, Catherine McNamara, explained how advice from a department may even breach the NZ Bill of Rights Act.
You can access the powerpoint presentations here:
Political Neutrality in the Public Service and the NZ Bill of Rights Act 1990 (154kb)
Political Neutrality (1.5MB)
The group then considered what guidance PSA should provide to its members, and how best to promulgate this guidance. We developed some good initial steps, received good feedback from the group on how best to structure the advice, and agreed that the Journal, PSA website, a ‘factsheet’ and incorporation of the principles into our delegate development training modules would be very good places to start. Once we have our online forum up and running, we will invite other ethics network members to discuss these ideas further.
Terms of reference The PSA executive has endorsed the terms of reference for the Ethics Network. Click here
Forum on public sector ethics, June 24 To launch the PSA Ethics Network, former PSA president Colin Hicks spoke at members’ forum in Wellington on public sector ethics. Colin was course co-ordinator in public sector ethics at Victoria University School of Government. Colin Hicks’ paper
Strong interest in ethics network About 200 PSA members have asked to be spent papers and have expressed an interest being kept informed about the PSA Ethics Network. The PSA is to set up an email group and online discussion forum to further the debate around ethical standards.
PSA to set up an ethics network Recent incidents have raised questions about ethical standards in the public sector. While isolated, they have the potential to undermine public confidence and the valuable work of public sector workers.
The PSA has identified the need for an ethics network to develop and promote a members’ perspective on issues of public sector ethics. Ethics are at the heart of public sector professionalism and to be vigilantly safeguarded.